FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we have part 2 of our look at Wind River’s latest news with a glance at their acquisition of RTLinux technology. RTLinux is a hard real-time version of Linux – the standard Kernel with a hard-RT core bolted on, that extends Wind River’s product range in Linux to cover the complete gamut from regular to soft-RT to hard-RT applications. Our latest feature has the details.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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Doin’ Hard Time
Wind River Adds RTLinux
If the concepts of “Linux” and “Real Time” are stored in different sections of your brain, you are not alone. Real-time Linux has always felt to me like a kind of operating system oxymoron – analogous to a hybrid SUV or a concrete canoe. In my mind, Linux’s heritage was the land of virtuality, dynamic allocation, and squishy priorities - all catch-as-catch-can on processor strokes. In such a place, the idea of soft real-time is palatable. You can imagine Linux “trying real hard” to get to your process and occasionally dropping a video frame or two if things don’t work out. No one would be the wiser.
Hard real-time, however, is another story. You don’t want to think about your pacemaker processor dallying a little too long servicing an unexpected interrupt or your automobile airbag handler getting confused worrying about a damaged headlamp before it gives the “deploy” order. We want more significant guarantees on those items than even a soft real-time Linux could provide.
Wind River has been providing commercial-grade Linux solutions for a while now, but the company’s hard real-time efforts were focused on their venerable VxWorks operating system. Today, however, Wind River announced that it is acquiring the intellectual property rights for RTLinux, a hard real-time version of Linux developed by FSMLabs. RTLinux was originally developed and patented at NMT (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology) and has been available in an open-source version (RTLinuxFree) and the commercial version RTLinuxPro from FSMLabs.
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