Yes, I've seen the KURT site, but not looked much closer at it.
Perhaps I should have mentioned Firm Real Time as a third kind. (It's
more or less what I sugested for multimedia later on in the original
post. However, I really don't like the normal mode/real time mode
switching idea...) But as I was more focused on the issue that makes all
the difference to some applications; guaranteed maximum latency; I
didn't consider firm real time significantly different from soft real
time. It is indeed in real life, but not to applications that really
require hard real time.
//David
> <QUOTE>
> Some types of processing (eg. multimedia) do not fit well into the
> hard or soft real-time categories. The periodic requests made by
> multimedia applications are sensitive to variations in timing. As
> such, they are not well served by the loose guarantees provided by
> soft real-time systems. Hard real-time systems are often faced with
> providing guarantees at the expense of providing services. Thus, while
> they can meet the timing requirements of a multimedia application,
> many times they cannot meet it's other service requirements. For
> example, real-time processes running under RTLinux have no access to
> any of the Linux services.
>
> A purely binary distinction between hard and soft real-time is clearly
> not acceptable for all applications. Many applications have
> requirements spanning a continuum between the two. ...
> </QUOTE>
>
> [With supposedly a demo where a modified xanim performs better on a
> loaded system.]
>
> --
> Raul
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