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Back in 2005, Red Hat decided to champion realtime capabilities in the Linux kernel. At the time, the Linux kernel development community was not in favor of including realtime capabilities, because all prior attempts to add this functionality had caused architectural problems or negatively impacted the performance of non-realtime systems. In order to deliver realtime capabilities that could be mainstreamed, Red Hat took a leadership stance and took an ambitious, lengthy, methodical approach to the design of these capabilities. In keeping with its role in the Linux community, Red Hat did all this work in an open, inclusive manner. The resulting work has produced a series of features that benefit not only realtime workloads, but also interactive desktop performance. In addition, these features provide increased throughput for database workloads.
Implementing realtime capabilities in cooperation with the upstream kernel community takes much longer, and is harder to conduct than in-house development of a custom kernel. However, the end result is a much more cleanly architected and robust implementation. The rigorous acceptance criteria and a wide diversity of test scenarios used for the upstream kernel ensures a superior realtime offering. By having features implemented upstream, the capabilities "carry forward" into future versions of the kernel, so MRG Realtime has the product longevity that proprietary realtime extensions do not.
To date, Red Hat has mainstreamed almost two-thirds of the MRG Realtime implementation by having it accepted and committed in the upstream kernel community, and Red Hat continues to mainstream additional capabilities with each successive upstream kernel release. In the coming year, Red Hat's goal is to work with the community to incorporate the complete implementation. Red Hat engineers are the lead architects and implementers of these realtime capabilities. Red Hat is the undisputed leader in the Linux community for robust realtime capabilities - and best able to provide robust commercial support. This is an important consideration, since realtime capabilities are implemented at the lowest, and most intricate level of the system, and may impact foundational system components like SMP locking, interrupt handling, and the scheduler. A good realtime implementation is not an add-on or an ad-hoc modification, but an integral part of the operating system. Red Hat is the expert who is making it happen in the mainline Linux community.