4 ms·
There is some benefit to real-time ability in an OS. Mainly, to prevent one application from freezing up the system. That's happened to me both on Windows and L
by nickpsecurity 7y ago
There is some benefit to real-time ability in an OS. Mainly, to prevent one application from freezing up the system. That's happened to me both on Windows and Linux. Took work to wrestle it back into my control again.
I remember people who used the QNX demo disk on old machines describing how they could do big compiles in the background with the system still responsive to input. I'm guessing the parts interacting with the user had higher priority.
- TickleSteve 7y agoThats priorities at work.... not bounded-response-time.
- nickpsecurity 7y agoGood point. A little out of my element here. :) Real-time might help in another way: mitigating covert channels. Gotta know the timing of secret-handling code. Then, make the observed timing fixed-length or random. Don't always need the timing to do that, though. For instance, the separation kernels just need timing for the partitions with whole thing stopping regardless of where code is at. One last benefit might be easier performance monitoring and diagnostics. If it's predictable, one might be able to assign a range or profile to it. Then, raise alarm if anything goes out of profile. Just speculating here: never built one.