“There has been much good work in making standard Linux into a
more responsive system for real-time applications. The low latency
patches and the preemption patches have allowed guarantees on worst
case interrupt response time at slightly above a millisecond. These
guarantees today are only met when there is no networking or
graphics activity in the system. The shielded processor concept
dedicates selected processors in a symmetric multiprocessing system
for the real-time components of an application.“This paper by Steve Brosky, Chief Scientist at Concurrent
Computer Systems, describes the implementation of shielded
processors in RedHawk Linux and the benefits of shielded
processors. It also presents the results of benchmarks for both
interrupt response and program execution determinism. Interrupt
response time guarantees are significantly below one millisecond
and can be guaranteed even in the presence of networking and
graphics activity…”
Complete
Story (includes link to whitepaper, in PDF format)