News Flash: Embedded Linux vendor Lineo Inc. became the first software company to publicly announce the licensing of Victor Yodaiken's patented process for running a general purpose operating system (such as Linux) as a task under a real-time kernel (such as href=”/links/LK8662675028.html” target=”_blank”>RTLinux or RTAI).

The following is an excerpt from Lineo's press release . . .

Salt Lake City, UT — August 6, 2001 — Lineo, Inc., a leading innovator in embedded systems software and real-time solutions, and FSMLabs Inc., the creators of RTLinux today announced a license agreement for Lineo to provide OEM customers with high performance, real-time embedded solutions integrating FSM's patented techniques of adding real-time support with the Lineo Embedix embedded operating system platform.

Under the agreement, FSMLabs grants Lineo and Lineo customers the right to freely distribute and market the dual kernel real-time technology with Lineo products.

By itself, Linux is only capable of providing soft real-time performance with no fixed latency guarantee. However, the technique patented by FSMLabs, and used by both FSM's RTLinux and the Lineo Embedix RealTime system software, provides OEMs with a high performance, hard real-time solution that fully preempts the reliable and robust Linux operating system whenever time critical operations are triggered.

Hard real-time systems provide guaranteed response time to designated tasks, regardless of what other tasks or activities are processed by a computing system. Solutions using the dual kernel hard real-time technology can routinely operate with guaranteed microsecond precision while providing the complete feature set of Linux. Combining the real-time technique and Linux capabilities is necessary for many performance-sensitive devices, such as industrial controls, robotics, medical instrumentation, telecommunication devices, network appliances and military simulation systems.

“The dual kernel approach has enormous advantages over older RTOS technologies,” said FSMLab's CEO Victor Yodaiken. “Our agreement with Lineo clears the way for both companies to innovate and broaden the market with superior technology and products.”

Protecting open source with patents?

In an interview this morning with LinuxDevices.com, Yodaiken said “the license agreement between FSM and Lineo shows how the open source movement allows protection of intellectual property while increasing customer choice.”

“Now, I think you can look forward to seeing some major technical advances and increased momentum for the 'dual kernel' hard real-time technology,” he added.

While Lineo's announcement appears to be the first public statement of a license to the patented dual-kernel technology, Yodaiken also said Lineo is not the first company to have licensed the technology.

Who's next?

A number of software companies other than Lineo implement real-time operating system technologies that may be impacted by the Yodaiken patent.

For example, VenturCom offers a real-time implementation of Microsoft's Windows NT that relies on an apparently similar approach.

GPL'd project attempts patent-free alternative

Karim Yaghmour, author of the popular Linux Trace Toolkit, launched a new open source project earlier this year in an effort to circumvent the Yodaiken patent while providing equivalent capabilities. Yagmour's project, called Adeos (Adaptive Domain Environment for Operating Systems), is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Yaghmour claims Adeos can support the kinds of dual-OS Linux environments that are today achieved using RTLinux or RTAI, but without making use of the technology covered by the Yodaiken patent.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.