Multi-media is an important area that shows the limitations of this kind of
thinking. DSP-type real-time applications don't use what they don't have,
namely the O/S's device drivers, thus doing similar applications under rtlinux
seems perfect, you don't have access to device drivers, and don't miss it.
For people doing multi-media, there's a class of application where you
want deterministic priority-driven resource allocation from the O/S, so
you can use the soundcard drivers, the cd-rom drivers, and the video display
for streaming media processing, without having your kernel compile make
it hiccup.
Real-time? Purists may argue not, I don't personally care.
Useful? Hell, yes.
rt-linux is only useful for that class of applications where you could
have used a DSP, or some other dedicated micro-controller, communicating
with a more O/S featureful host, but want to decrease your expenses ($$ and
development time) and do both on a single system. Thats great, but hardly
describes all real-time applications, and totally fails for peudo-realtime
stuff like multi-media.
Regards,
Sam
Btw, have the rt-linux devlopers thought about or implemented the POSIX.4b
pthreads API? Then at least you'd have portable code between its threads
and other POSIX systems.
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