In the last several years, real-time extensions for Linux have provided many significant improvements, like the extensions provided by the PREMPT_RT patch. And more recently there has been much attention on "Linux User Space" solutions for multicore devices that enable direct access from user space to underlying hardware often called “bare metal” implementations. But “bare metal” most often means single threaded execution Linux emulation on a single core in a multicore device, and therefore is a special use case. Can there be any other general real-time improvements for multicore based solutions that require multithreading in Linux, i.e. that are not single threaded? Multi-threading via POSIX PTHREADS in Linux is the time tested method for achieving better real-time performance for more complex and coupled applications within the context of a Linux process. Enea has developed a new light-weight threading model for Linux that unlike PTHREADS, operates entirely in user space, and potentially offers greater than 10x performance over PTHREADS in scheduling latency and inter-thread communications latency. And further, and even compared to PREEMPT_RT, this model shows potentially greater than 10X performance in interrupt latency behavior. This solution is called LWRT – Light-weight Run-time Threading. But real-time means different things to different people, and LWRT does not apply to all. This presentation will:
