An early RTLinux paper with Michael Barabanov.
real_time_1996
Only 20 years later, the idea is now not too scary.
Real-Time Linux
Michael Barabanov Victor Yodaiken March 3, 1996
1 Introduction
If you wanted to control a camera or a robot or a scientific instrument from a PC, it would be natural to think of using Linux so that you could take advantage of the development environment, X-windows, and all the networking support. But, Linux cannot reliably run these kinds of hard real-time applications. A simple experiment will illustrate the problem. Take a speaker and hook it up to one of the pins from the parallel port. Then run a program that toggles the pin. If your program is the only one running, the speaker will produce a nice somewhat steady tone. Not completely steady, but not bad. When Linux updates the file system every couple of seconds, you might notice a small change in tone. If you move the mouse over a couple of windows the tone becomes irregular. If you start netscape in one of the windows, you will hear intervals of silence as your program waits for higher priority processes to run.
The problem is that Linux, like most general purpose operating systems, is designed to optimize average performance and to try to give every process a fair share of compute time. This is great for general purpose computing, but for real-time programming precise timing and predictable performance is more important than average performance. For example, if a camera fills a buffer every millisecond, then a momentary delay in the process reading that buffer may cause data loss. If a stepper motor in a lithography machine must be turned on and off in precise intervals in order to minimize vibration and to move a wafer into position at the correct time a momentary delay may cause an unrecoverable failure. And consider what might happen if the task that causes an emergency shutdown of a chemistry experiment must wait to run until Netscape redraws the window. It turns out that redesigning Linux to provide guaranteed performance would take an enormous amount of work. And taking on such a job would defeat our original purpose. Instead of having an off the shelf general purpose OS, we would have a custom made special purpose OS that would not be riding the wave of the main Linux development effort. So what we did was slip a small, simple, real-time operating system underneath Linux. Linux becomes a task that runs
only when there is no real-time task to run and we pre-empt Linux whenever a real-time task needs the processor. The changes needed in Linux itself are pretty minimal. Linux is mostly unaware of the real-time operating system as it goes about its business of running processes, catching interrupts, and controlling devices. But real-time tasks can run to a quite high level of precision. In our test P120 system, we can schedule tasks to run within a precision of about 20 microseconds.
And more ….