The realtime Linux patches, covered at length (too much length, according to some) on these pages, have been aimed primarily at reducing scheduling latency: the amount of time it takes to switch ...

Performance is a topic that never strays far from the mind of most embedded systems developers. However, relatively speaking, many of us have it easy. We develop soft real-time systems in which a few ...

The read-copy-update (RCU) algorithm has found many applications since it was added to the 2.5 kernel. By eliminating lock contention in many situations, RCU can greatly improve performance and ...

Interrupts are a major feature of most embedded microcontrollers and effective real time response to interrupts is vital in low power systems that often rely on a ‘run fast then stop’ approach to ...

Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low ...

Edge-triggered interrupts are useful in microcontroller (MCU) applications for processing asynchronous events like switch closures, level transitions, and pulses. However, low-cost MCUs offer limited ...

A technical paper titled “CV32RT: Enabling Fast Interrupt and Context Switching for RISC-V Microcontrollers” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich and University of Bologna. “Processors using the ...

When do you need to use a real-time operating system (RTOS) for an embedded project? What does it bring to the table, and what are the costs? Fortunately there are strict technical definitions, which ...

Low-Power/High-Performance engineering sat down to discuss latency with Chris Rowen, CTO at Tensilica; Andrew Caples, senior product manager for Nucleus in Mentor Graphics’ Embedded Software Division; ...

When debugging something as involved as kernel scheduler timings, you would typically use one of the software-based debugging mechanisms available. However, in cases when software is close to bare ...