Novell's RTOS Gets an Overhaul
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SLERT 10 adds new pre-emption features and microsecond timers
By P. J. Connolly
December 15, 2007 —
Sometimes, what’s in a name is a road map. Novell brought its real-time Linux offering into line with the naming of the rest of its SUSE Linux family, when it released SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 on Nov. 27. The second release of the company’s RTOS came a year and a month after its debut in October 2006, and offers updates to real-time features that aim to reduce system latency and improve predictability.
Although both the first and second releases use the company’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as a foundation technology, this version is more fully integrated with the underlying Linux OS, said the company. Novell worked with the open source community to supply the real-time components in the update, which was built on the 2.6.22 kernel, explained Kerry Kim, Novell’s product marketing manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, or SLERT.
The initial release’s real-time capabilities came from work Novell did with Concurrent Computer, Kim noted, and were later released into open source. Concurrent remains in the family picture for SLERT, which is “fully instrumented” for the company’s NightStar debug and analysis tools, explained Concurrent president and CEO Gary Trimm in a prepared statement.
The RTOS update adds new features for pre-emption, including priority inheritance, sleeping spinlocks and thread run interrupts. The first allows lower-priority processes to inherit the priority of parent processes, while the second allows developers to free up resources for higher priority processes by suspending lower priority resource locks, or spinlocks. Finally, kernel run interrupt threads allow hardware and software interrupts to be pre-empted by higher-priority processes as defined by the user.
SLERT 10 lets users define the assignment of processes and threads to individual processor cores, claims Novell, and isolates real-time services from other system functions with the aim of improving predictability and reliability.
Also new in this release are timer kernel services that operate with a much finer degree of accuracy, noted the company. The low-fidelity POSIX timer service from the initial release ran with a 40-millisecond resolution, but the new implementation cuts that to just two microseconds. This allows Novell to claim that system processing can now be accounted for by the nanosecond.
SLERT 10 includes the ability to assign and shield CPUs in a multiprocessor environment for greater predictability and reliability. It also works with the latest release of open source InfiniBand protocol OFED (OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution 1.2.5), a fabric interconnect designed to improve connectivity and throughput.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 is available now for an annual subscription of US$2,500; current customers are eligible for upgrades without additional charge. The software is sold as an add-on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and requires a patch level of SP1 or later.
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