What Every Driver Developer Should Know about RT - Julia Cartwright, National Instruments
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2018-03-14

What Every Driver Developer Should Know about RT - Julia Cartwright, National Instruments

PREEMPT_RT, also known as "the rt patch" is a patchset ontop of the vanilla Linux kernel which helps provide bound timing guarantees for user task execution, a required property for any real-time application.

The rt patch has a long history out of mainline. What used to be a slow trickle of patches moving from the rt patch to mainline has now accelerated with the formation of the Real Time Linux LF project, which is actively funding the engineering work necessary to bring merge the patch into mainline.

However, long after the core PREEMPT_RT changes land in mainline, we'll still be stuck dealing with a long tail of problems in Linux's thousands of device drivers. The intent of this presentation is to describe the classes of problems in drivers which have detrimental impact to RT, why they cause issues on RT, and how they might be resolved."

About Julia Cartwright
Julia is a software engineer at National Instruments where she's been involved in Linux Kernel and device driver projects spanning nearly ten years. Her most active interests are real-time system design and the PREEMPT_RT patch. She's currently acting maintainer on a stable release of the RT patch. Her other interests include task scheduling, ARM SoC support, FPGAs, and power management.

She's previously spoken at a variety of venues including ELC, the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), the Real-Time Linux Workshop (RTLWS) and the Real-Time Summit. On any given day, you can also find her answering questions on the linux-rt-users mailing list and on IRC in #linux-rt and #kernelnewbies on OFTC.