Andrew Josey of the Open Group submitted this summary of the Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum held in San Jose, CA in February 2001. Josey writes . . .

The Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum met from Tuesday afternoon February 6th through to Thursday February 8th. The forum was divided into three sessions, an open session on real-time and embedded Linux, the general open plenary session and the forum working group meetings. A joint meeting on quality of service for real-time systems was also held and that is minuted separately.

The first session was on the topic of real-time and embedded Linux. This included four presentations from speakers from FSM Labs, LinuxDevices.com, MontaVista and Lineo outlining the multiple approaches to achieving real-time capabilities with Linux and a market survey of the embedded marketplace. One approach to real-time is to run Linux as a subthread of a real-time executive (for example RTLinux), the other being to add real-time capabilities to Linux itself (MontaVista). The market survey from LinuxDevices.com showed that the major factors for the popularity of Linux as an embedded system are availability of source code, the lack of run-time royalties, and the robustness of the product. [Note: the slides from the LinuxDevices.com talk are now online.]

The second session was the general plenary with invited speakers. This included two keynote sessions from Gabriel Broner of SGIand and Inder Singh from LynuxWorks. The sessions ranged from presentations on hard real-time operating systems, through security for real-time systems in the power industry, real-time Java, the Department of Defense Real-time Common Operating Environment, to the movement towards standards based solutions in the avionics industry.

The issues that kept recurring were security and standardisation. This as a reflection of how wide-open the market place is in open system considerations and user requirements vs. vendor solutions.

The third session was the working group meeting for the forum members. The objectives of this meeting were to review the output of the last meeting, to examine the charters of the established subgroups and to identify work items and volunteers.

Further details of the sessions (notes and slidesets) are available from the forum's website.

The future meeting schedule for the forum is as follows . . .

• March 22nd — Brussels, Belgium — Regional Chapter meeting
  
• Week commencing April 23 — Berlin, Germany — Forum Meeting
  
• Week commencing July 16 — Austin, Texas — Forum Meeting
  
• Week commencing October 22 — Amsterdam, Holland — Forum Meeting

 
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