Comment by refulgentis

1 month ago

There was a discussion on real time Linux this week and I was SHOCKED to see comments from people who work on embedded devices that "real time" is vibes. i.e. a stack that tries to be predictable but isn't necessarily.

I'm curious for your expertise on that: my guess is some people can get away with that, but if you're operating ex. a medical laser, you gotta take it more seriously and actually guarantee ex. "This code will be delayed at most 8 ms, it's thread is guaranteed to get CPU time by then"

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refulgentis

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ijustlovemath  1 month ago

This is the difference between soft and hard realtime. For something that's heavy on signal processing, with some softer comms requirements (eg a B115200 serial interface for commanding/uploading programs), I'd probably reach for an FPGA + Linux MCU (a vendored Linux made for these kinds of applications).

I certainly would never describe a product as real time if there was not a true realtime component to it, but I think people think it sounds cool and slap it on anything that's high performance. Happy to answer any specific questions on my email, see the profile.