OT: safer nuclear reactors

Posted Oct 21, 2004 17:07 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755)
In reply to: OT: safer nuclear reactors by alext
Parent article: Approaches to realtime Linux

This is, as always, a tradeoff.

Response latency can usefull be characterized as "M% of the time, the system will successfully respond within N ms." The more important it is to you, the closer to 100 M must be.

But the underlying point is that for values of M less than 100.0, it's often possible to combine soft-real-time techniques with throw-hardware-at-it, and get a useful result. And Linus' assertion, with which I agree now, is that if you really need 100.0%, because people may be hurt or killed, or the value of things which may be destroyed is sufficiently high, that at *best* you should indeed be running Linux as a task under a small, tight, HRT kernel.

LinuxRT and RTAI may be good enough; they may not.