Michael Greene: Re: Lucent Inferno, Hard or Soft real time?
I read the technical paper "Real Time Inferno" by A. Sharma of the
Lucent Inferno OS Development Team. It can be found in the Technical
Information section of the Inferno Web page. It is a short paper that
defines real time and distinguishs "hard real time" vs. "soft real
time".
I'm not an expert in this field but, after reading this paper, I came
to the conclusion that Inferno is soft real time.
The author states,
"Some soft real-time systems do not quantify their timeliness, but
have a degree of confidence of being able to meet the soft real-time
requirements. They do so by:
- having a small size, simple design.
- having small overheads, i.e., fast context switching, small interupt
latency, etc.
- scheduling real-time tasks at higher priority levels"
The author then goes on to state,
" Inferno supports applications with real-time constraints. It does so
by having small runtime overheads, being small, and providing high
priorities for run-time tasks."
The Inferno application examples, elsewhere on the Inferno Web page,
seem to fall into the soft real-time category, as defined by the
author.
In the Inferno FAQs, in response to the question,
"Who do you see as your top competitors?",
Lucent states that, "Several products compete with Inferno on
specific, individual levels such as: OS9, QNX, JavaOS,and GEOS."
VxWorks is not mentioned.
Do you think that my conclusion that Inferno is soft real-time is
correct? Please respond, anyone.
Best Regards,
Frank |
