Red Hat is working on a real-time enabled version of its enterprise Linux distribution that will target financial institutions and electronic trading systems. Additionally, it is working with JPMorgan, Cisco, and a host of others on a real-time networking specification aimed at financial services applications.

According to a brief eWEEK story, Red Hat's director of emerging technologies, Tim Burke, shared details about the company's forthcoming RHEL 5.0 Real-time Edition at the “Linux/Open Source on Wall Street” conference in New York yesterday. Also at the conference, John O'Hara, a distinguished engineer with JPMorgan, spoke about AMQP (advanced message queuing protocol), a real-time networking spec under development for three years by JPMorgan, Chase Bank, Cisco, Envoy, iMatix, IONA, Red Hat, TWIST Process Innovations, and 29West.

Burke reportedly said that Red Hat has been working for two years on its real-time initiative. To date, the initiative has produced patches affecting about 1.2 million lines of kernel code — mainly to improve messaging and close “black holes.” About half the changes were merged with the mainline kernel over the past year, according to the story.

Greater real-time performance in the kernel can improve the performance of applications that are “latency bottlenecked due to kernel scheduling and interrupt handling,” Burke reportedly said. Such applications need not be recompiled to benefit from the improvements.

On the downside, increased real-time responsiveness tends to decrease average overall processing throughput. And, real-time kernels can do little to improve sub-optimal user-space code, such as unbounded Java garbage collection.

More details about AMQP and Red Hat's efforts in the real-time domain can be found in the complete eWEEK story, here.

Earlier this year, real-time Linux specialist FSMLabs sold its embedded business to Wind River, in order to focus on its electronic trading systems business.

 
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