Soft Real-Time Linux Overview

Overview

As real-time capabilities are becoming relevant in main-stream desk-top Linux more and more, and new variants and ideas are popping up all over the Open-Source world, a notoriously incomplete, overview of the existing variants of soft-real time Linux is given in the paper. Many of the variants are for special purposes, some are more general approaches that target every-day soft-rt demands, like audio/video streaming, finding the way through the many approaches and selecting the one that best fits the problem is not always easy, this paper hopes to clarify a few basic terms and technological concepts, in the hope that it will simplify this selection process.