OSPERT has issued a call for papers for its OSPRT'09 real-time Linux workshop in Dublin, Ireland, on June 30th. In other real-time news, Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar are returning to their preempt-rt patch project, after working on x86 support for a year-and-a-half.

OSPERT (Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time Applications) is now seeking papers for its fifth annual workshop. OSPERT'09 is co-located with the Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems's ECRTS'09 academic real-time conference. This move, along with the naming of Red Hat Linux kernel hacker Peter Zijlstra as OSPERT co-chair, is billed as an attempt better integrate the academic real-time community with the Linux real-time embedded community.

Topics for paper submissions include but are not limited to:

• Dynamic reconfiguration and upgrading
• Support for component based development
• Scalability, from very small scale embedded systems to full-fledged OSes
• Flexible scheduling
• Quality of Service guarantees
• Real-time on Linux
• Interaction with reconfigurable hardware
• Support for embedded multiprocessor architectures
• Coordinated management of multiple resources
• Security and fault tolerance for embedded real-time systems
• Power-aware operating systems

Paper submissions are due by April 4, and should be formatted as 6-10 page PS or PDF files, and submitted via a soon to be installed workshop submission system, say the organizers. Accepted papers will then be revised and resubmitted in final form by June 9. (Contact information is at the end of this article.)

Thomas Gleixner

Gleixner and Molnar take preemptive measures

A recent LWN.net article reports that Ingo Molnar and Thomas Gleixner (pictured) have returned to their work on the “RT Linux” tree. The real-time preemption project is an ongoing attempt to provide deterministic response times in a general-purpose Linux kernel.

Gleixner and Molnar are interviewed by editor Jonathan Corbet about the project. In the short term, the two aim to create a refactored preempt-rt patch against Linux-2.6.29-rc4. The patch is working on x86 (32 and 64bit), says the story, but has not yet been updated for ARM, PPC and MIPS platforms.

The PREEMPT_RT patches provide guarantees for hard timing deadlines, as required by many mission critical applications in industries like telecom, military, healthcare, music recording, and financial trading. Sometimes referred to as the “RT Preempt” patch, PREEMPT_RT was originally developed by Molnar and Gleixner. It represents the upstream version of the real-time patches integrated by MontaVista, Red Hat, Novell, and others, into the “real-time” versions of their commercial Linux offerings.

When asked by Corbet why they had returned to the project, Gleixner joked, “boredom and nostalgia.” Molnar was then quoted as saying, “When we left for the x86 land more than 1.5 years ago, the -rt patch-queue was a huge pile of patches that changed hundreds of critical kernel files and introduced/touched ten thousand new lines of code. Fast-forward 1.5 years and the -rt patchqueue is a humongous pile of patches that changes nearly a thousand critical kernel files and introduces/touches twenty-thirty thousand lines of code. So we thought that while the project is growing nicely, it is useful, and obviously people love it — the direction of growth was a bit off, and that this particular area needs some help.”

In other recent PREEMPT_RT news, the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) last month announced a new “latest stable” release, built on the Linux 2.6.26 kernel.

Availability

More information on OSPERT'09, to be held on June 30 in Dublin, Ireland, may be found here. The number of participants may be limited, and there will be a small charge for workshop registration, say the organizers. More information on the venue and hotel reservations may be found at the ECRTS'09 site, here.

The entertaining LWN.net. article and interview with Gleixner and Molnar, should be here.

The “Latest Stable” release of PREEMPT_RT 2.6.26.8-rt16 is available now. More information may be found here.

 
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