Real-Time Enhancements for Embedded Linux

With the popularity of using Linux for embedded systems, its real-time performance is increasingly becoming an importance issue for applications that require short latency and task execution predictability as commonly encountered in many embedded systems. This paper presents a survey of the approaches used by commercial vendors and open source community to enhance the real-time performance of the Linux kernel. It outlines some of the main factors that affect the real-time performance of the Linux kernel and describes the two general approaches that are used to improve the real-time performance of the kernel, follows by a comparative study of the various real-time enhanced versions of the Linux that are created for embedded systems.