We are pleased to announce that the RT Microconference has been accepted into the 2018 Linux Plumbers Conference! The Real-Time patch (also known as PREEMPT_RT) has been developed out of tree since 2004. Although it hasn’t yet been fully merged, several enhancements came to the Linux kernel directly as the result of the RT patch. These include, mutexes, high resolution timers, lockdep, ftrace, RT scheduling, SCHED_DEADLINE, RCU_PREEMPT, cross-arch generic interrupt logic, priority inheritance futexes, threaded interrupt handlers, to name a few. All that is left is the conversion of the kernel spinning locks into mutexes, and the transformation is complete. There’s talk about that happening by the end of this year or early next year.

Topics proposed for this year’s event include how PREEMPT_RT will be maintained when it gets into the kernel, who’s going to maintain it, how do we catch when it breaks, updates to lockdep, addition of selftests, discussions of RT related failures, stable backports, safety critical domains, and more.

If you would like to contribute to the discussion, please feel free to contact Steven (rostedt@goodmis.org) or Julia (julia@ni.com).

We hope to see you there!