We are pleased to announce that the Real-Time Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! The PREEMPT_RT patch set (aka “The Real-Time Patch”) was created in 2004 in the effort to make Linux into a hard real-time designed operating system. Over the years much of the RT patch has made it into mainline Linux, which includes: mutexes, lockdep, high-resolution timers, Ftrace, RCU_PREEMPT, priority inheritance, threaded interrupts and much more. There’s just a little left to get RT fully into mainline, and the light at the end of the tunnel is finally in view. It is expected that the RT patch will be in mainline within a year, which changes the topics of discussion. Once it is in Linus’s tree, a whole new set of issues must be handled. The focus on this year’s Plumbers events will include:

• Real-time containers
• Rework of softirqs (Requirement for the PREEMPT-RT merge)
• An in-kernel view of latency
• Improvements in the locking determinism
• Advances in the RCU for reducing the per-cpu workload
• The effects of BPF in the kernel latency
• Core scheduling and Real-time schedulers
• Maintaining the RT stable trees
• New tools to test RT kernels
• New bootup self-tests
• New types of failures that lockdep can detect after RT is merged

Come and join us in the discussion of making the LWN prediction of RT coming into mainline “this year” a reality!

We hope to see you there!