LinuxMusicians

he realtime preemption project is a longstanding effort to provide deterministic response times in a general-purpose kernel. Much code resulting from this work has been merged into the mainline kernel over the last few years, and a number of vendors are shipping commercial products based upon it. But, for the last year or so, progress toward getting the rest of the realtime work into the mainline has slowed.
On February 11, realtime developers Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar resurfaced with the announcement of a new realtime preemption tree and a newly reinvigorated development effort. Your editor asked them if they would be willing to answer a few questions about this work; their response went well beyond the call of duty. Read on for a detailed look at where the realtime preemption tree stands and what's likely to happen in the near future.