Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261317AbUJWWGZ (ORCPT ); Sat, 23 Oct 2004 18:06:25 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261324AbUJWWGY (ORCPT ); Sat, 23 Oct 2004 18:06:24 -0400 Received: from rproxy.gmail.com ([64.233.170.204]:25175 "EHLO rproxy.gmail.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261317AbUJWWGG (ORCPT ); Sat, 23 Oct 2004 18:06:06 -0400 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:reply-to:to:subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:references; b=a1JB+WpvSahhNSgQ2f35RaIxqgUkbjRteotRGfxckup97B5Z2Q4uYI6Ohc9pSo0DLOr/PxBeyTQNbBNy+Jd6y+TAlBo0BM2gG14nzAWXRUnp15woqkPExROCXxP3AF294xAgeryLc4O2QZblhYRAxvmseJAV1wTT6kAfeUDevds= Message-ID: <35fb2e5904102315066c6892aa@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:06:03 +0100 From: Jon Masters Reply-To: jonathan@jonmasters.org To: paulmck@us.ibm.com Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] Restricted hard realtime Cc: Thomas Gleixner , LKML , Ingo Molnar , karim@opersys.com In-Reply-To: <20041023212421.GF1267@us.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <20041023194721.GB1268@us.ibm.com> <1098562921.3306.182.camel@thomas> <20041023212421.GF1267@us.ibm.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2391 Lines: 47 On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 14:24:21 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 10:22:01PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote: > > On Sat, 2004-10-23 at 12:47 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > I haven't seen an embedded SMP system yet. Focussing this on SMP systems > > is ignoring the majority of possible applications. > Seeing SMP support for ARM lead me to believe that this was not too far > over the edge. They have an SMP reference implementation, however many folks don't actually want to go the dual core approach right now for embedded designs (apparently the increased design complexity isn't worth it). I've had protracted discussions about this very issue quite recently indeed. Others will disagree, I'm only basing my statement upon conversations with various engineers - I think your idea eventually becomes interesting, but now is not the right moment to be pushing it yet. People still don't want this now. Talk to smartphone manufacturers who currently have dual ARM core designs, one running Linux and the other running an RTOS for the GSM and phone stuff, and they'll say they actually want to reduce the design complexity down to a single core. Talking to people suggests that multicore designs are good in certain situations (such as in the case above), but in general people aren't yet going to respond to your way of doing realtime :-) Yes you do have only one OS in there, maybe that would change opinion, but we're not quite at the point where everything is multicore so you're not going to convince the masses. Having said all that, for a different perspective, I hack on ppc (Xilinx Virtex II Pro) kernel and userspace stuff for some folks that make high resolution imaging equipment, involving extremely precise control over a pulsed signal and data acquisition (we're talking nanosecond/microsecond precision). Since Linux obviously isn't capable of this level of deterministic response right now we end up farming out work to a separate core - it's unlikely your approach would convince the hardware folks, but I guess it might be tempting at some point in the future. Who knows. Jon. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/