Re: a joint letter on low latency and Linux

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Rogier Wolff wrote:

[snip]
> In short: we need hard-realtime in the mainstream Linux kernel. 

This single stipulation is not good enough:

We need hard-realtime from userspace. We need hard-realtime that is mostly
safe with binary only applications. We need hard-realtime that can mostly
be debugged, that will work with multiple 10k+ statement programs running
at once.

We dont need the superfast, edge of the hardware, performance offered by
RTlinux.

Perhaps we need two new terms:

Fast-hard-realtime: Hard-realtime approaching the limitations of hardware. 
		    This is what RTLinux supplies.
Slow-hard-realtime: Realtime that is orders of magnatude less then what
		    the hardware is capable. This type just requires
		    better kernel design (i.e. no O(N^3) algos) and a tiny
		    amount of very carefully selected preemption points.
		    Linux should do this out of the box.