Real time's time arrives
Doghouse – Real Time
A work in progress for more than 20 years, real-time support in Linux's mainline kernel may at last be "good enough for all practical purposes."
It has been announced that in the next kernel to be released that "real-time" processing will be much improved.
I have had a love-hate relationship with "real time" from the days when I first started programming in 1969. Much of the programming I did in those days was in assembly language, and often with a computer that had no operating system, running one task at a time. You could write your program to do constant "polling" of some event, and when that event happened, you immediately addressed it.
Of course, this meant that the entire computer was dedicated to a single function, and when the computer cost $50,000 it had to be a fairly important event for you to capture. It did not help that the computer of that day might only operate at 100,000 instructions per second.
[...]
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