Linux for real time

The notions of real-time and communication in an operating system are indispensable for technical and industrial applications, and here we share our day-to-day experience of the Linux system in the automation field, which is particularly demanding in terms of responsiveness, reliability and repeatability.

Indeed, designers of automated production systems (SAP) have to cope with increasingly severe constraints, performance requirements in terms of quality and productivity, the use and monitoring of new technologies both for sensors and actuators and for control electronics, etc., not to mention the enormous advances in materials and mechanics.

Here we cover the real-time and deterministic aspects required for industrial computing, communication and automation applications, leaving it to the user to extrapolate to other fields of application.

The industrial world is using more and more PCs, which come in all shapes and sizes: office, industrial rack, shoe box, panel PC, etc. Their ease of communication and cooperative network operation meet the need for information exchange to ensure production responsiveness. As a result, they have found their way into workshops, in particular to supervise and control production machines. They are entrusted with increasingly complex tasks, and even support automation and numerical control applications. But in this case, they are required to be robust, reliable, safe and, of course, high-performing.

While today's hardware meets these criteria, the same cannot be said for certain operating systems, originally developed for non-critical office applications. Industrial users need to turn to an operating system that meets their requirements, with the assurance that the system is future-proof, widely available and scalable. This is the case with the Linux system, which has now reached maturity, with a growing number of references in critical and embedded applications.

Linux has become a robust operating system, integrating Unix functionality with a wide choice of applications and associated free software. The quality of this software and its wide distribution make Linux a cost-effective product, offering a supported computing platform suited to the industrial enterprise environment. A stable, reliable system, Linux meets the needs of real-time, mission-critical applications in the industrial sector, particularly for shop-floor communication and control of automated production systems.