RTLinux: Difference between revisions

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== Background ==

The key RTLinux design objective was to add hard real-time capabilities to a commodity operating system to facilitate the development of complex control programs with both capabilities.<ref name="manifesto">"The RTLinux Manifesto", Victor Yodaiken, 5th Linux Conference Proceedings, 1999, [http://www.yodaiken.com/papers/rtlmanifesto.pdf]</ref><ref name="redist">"Cheap Operating systems Research", Victor Yodaiken. Published in the Proceedings of the First Conference on Freely Redistributable Systems, Cambridge MA, 1996 [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.9505 ]</ref> For example, one might want to develop a real-time motor controller that used a commodity database and exported a web operator interface. Instead of attempting to build a single operating system that could support real-time and non-real-time capabilities, RTLinux was designed to share a computing device between a real-time and non-real-time operating system so that (1) the real-time operating system could never be blocked from execution by the non-real-time operating system and (2) components running in the two different environments could easily share data. As the name implies RTLinux was originally designed to use Linux as the non-real-time system<ref name="barabanov">{{cite web|url=http://www.yodaiken.com/papers/BarabanovThesis.pdf|title=Barabanov, Michael (1996). "A Linux Based Real-Time Operating System"|publisher=}}</ref> but it eventually evolved so that the RTCore real-time kernel could run with either Linux or [[BSD UNIX]].

[[Multi-Environment Real-Time]] (MERT) was the first example of a real-time operating system coexisting with a UNIX system. MERT relied on traditional virtualization techniques: the real-time kernel was the ''host'' operating system (or [[hypervisor]]) and Bell Systems UNIX was the ''guest''. RTLinux was an attempt to update the MERT concept to the PC era and commodity hardware. It was also an attempt to also overcome the performance limits of MERT, particularly the overhead introduced by virtualization.