Re: RT patch acceptance

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Nick Piggin wrote:
I have never been in any doubt as to the specific claims I have
made. I continually have been talking about hard realtime from
start to finish, and it appears that everyone now agrees with me
that for hard-RT, a nanokernel solution is better or at least
not obviously worse at this stage.

It is only better in that if you need provable hard-RT *right now*, then you have to use a nanokernel. The RT patch doesn't provide guaranteed hard-RT yet[1], but it may in the future. Any RT application programmer would rather write for a single image system than a split kernel. So if it does eventually provide hard-RT, just about every new RT application will target it (due to it being easier to program for). In addition it radically improves soft-RT performance *now*, which a nanokernel doesn't help with at all. "Best" would be getting preempt-RT to become guaranteed hard-RT, or if that proves impossible, to have a nanokernel in addition to preempt-RT's good statistical soft-RT guarantees.

I think where we violently disagree is that in your earlier posts you seemed to imply that a nanokernel hard-RT solution obviates the need for something like preempt-RT. That is not the case at all, and at the moment they are quite orthogonal. In the future they may not be orthogonal, because *if* preempt-RT patch becomes guaranteed hard-RT, it would pretty much relegate nanokernels to only those applications requiring formal verification.

 - Jim Bruce

P.S. Preempt-RT is a sight to behold while updatedb is running. The difference between it and ordinary preempt is quite impressive. Nothing currently running has so much as a hiccup, even though / is using the non-latency-friendly ReiserFS. The only way I even notice updatedb is running at all is through my CPU monitor and the fact that disk IO is slower.

[1] By this I mean on a system loaded with low priority tasks doing the relatively arbitrary things one might do on a live system.
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