Evaluation of interrupt handling timeliness in real-time Linux operating systems

Abstract

Several real-time Linux extensions are available nowadays. Two of those extensions that have received special attention recently are Preempt-RT and Xenomai. This paper evaluates to what extent they provide deterministic guarantees when reacting to external events, an essential characteristic when it comes to real-time systems. For this, we define two simple experimental approaches. Our results indicate that Preempt-RT is more prone to temporal variations than Xenomai when the system is subject to overload scenarios.