Real-time Software on Linux: How hard can it be?

By Jeff Anderson

Are you sure your software is running? What about in the next few microseconds? Let’s walk through how to answer this question, and write latency-critical software on Linux. You’ll get a headstart from the hardware to userspace, learning about BIOS quirks, kernel settings, paging, tools, application design, and common pitfalls. We’ll squeeze determinism out of PREEMPT_RT Linux, reduce the jitter in our cycle-times and networking from milliseconds to microseconds, and show off some real hardware demos from the industrial automation field.