There has been much focus in the last decade on improving Linux real-time performance and behavior, most notably the PREEMPT_RT Linux real-time extensions. And more recently there has been much work on Linux user-space solutions for multicore devices that enable direct access from user space to underlying hardware, thereby avoiding additional overhead of involving the Linux kernel in user-space applications. These user-space extensions (and there are several) have been primarily driven by the telecom/networking high performance IP packet processing market for so-called “bare metal” implementations, wherein a Linux user-space application in a multicore device can mimic the performance of an “OS-less” solution, namely a simple run-to-completion, polling loop on each core for packet processing. And while that goal has been essentially met, the solution is still for a very special use case.
Are there other use cases that demand performance improvements not completely addressed by the above? If so, then what are these use cases, and are there further Linux real-time improvements that can be applied?
The answer is “yes,” with Linux user space light-weight threading (LWT). So let’s examine the issues with respect to real-time Linux, and how light-weight threading can be a solution for some applications. The focus here is driven by telecom, networking, or general communications applications, on which Enea focuses its technology. But overall, this focus on light-weight threading could be of benefit to many markets.
Continue to the Enea contributed article in the EE Catalog on the following link to read more http://eecatalog.com/embeddedlinux/2012/06/28/improve-linux-real-time-performance-in-multicore-devices-with-light-weight-threading/
