20 Years in the making: Real-Time Linux finally makes it to the kernel
Summary
Unlike general-purpose operating systems like Windows or macOS, an RTOS is built to respond to events and process data within strict time constraints, often measured in milliseconds or microseconds. Ingo Molnar, a senior Linux kernel developer, started collecting and reshaping pieces of these technologies in 2004 to build the foundation for the real-time preemption patch set PREEMPT_RT. It was then that many companies started using this patch set to build industrial systems requiring hard real-time properties with millisecond precision. He was using it because, like most musicians, he was too broke to buy high-end gear so "he got a cheap laptop, with Linux and JACK, because with the real time patch it would do good recording instead of skipping when the hard drive was writing." Here are 5 dependable solutions The final hurdle for full integration was reworking the kernels print_k function, a critical debugging tool dating back to 1991.