Phil Wilshire, of www.RealTimeLinux.org reports . . .

Day 2 of the Real Time Workshop continued, with an extensive investigation of the inner workings and techniques of the Real Time Linux Extensions.

• Behnard Kuhn detailed the NMT Real Time Linux Kernel.
• Paolo Mantegazza presented the history of the RTAI development, and touched on the wealth of features available in this system.
• Douglas Niehaus presented the KURT system followed by Raj Rajkumar's work on the Resource Kernel.

After lunch, a session on tips and techniques for avoiding common programming problems was presented by Tomasz Motyletski, author of the portable shared memory package.

This was followed by a session on the COMEDI Device driver system by David Schleef. A notable commitment from David Schleef “If you just do the low level driver code I will maintain its interface into the COMEDI system”.

The RED Linux project was then presented by Yu-Chung Wang. Later, Dilma Menezes outlined the SMART scheduler.

The day finished with two more important presentations:

• A. J. Niessen detailed the success of Linux and Real Time Linux within Philips. A significant impact on Philips has been “Time to Market” for its Linux products. The ease with which device drivers can be produced and the commonality of the tools used within the Lab Unix development environment AND the target systems has reduced training requirements and speeded development.
• The hard facts of the hard deadlines available inside the Real Time Kernel were presented by Helmut Dohmann. The results — under 30 uSec worst case interrupt Latency even under heavy cpu load.

This was an unforgettable opportunity to experience the depth and range of Real Time techniques being developed for Linux. Some industry leaders are starting to seriously adopt Linux into its embedded projects. They are finding benefits and having success. As Real Time Linux is ported to more platforms, more choices will become available for low cost embedded systems. The scope and depth of training of students working on Linux projects provides a future source of skill for these industries. The concept of the Open Source approach means that software can be rapidly produced to meet a solution. Students can learn from working examples without having to make guesses or re-invent old methods.

The final day of the conference will discuss the definition of the Real Time Linux API and initiate some platform porting projects.

 
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