We are pleased to announce that the Real-time Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!

After another successful Real-time microconference at LPC last year, there’s still more to work to be done. 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 (and possibly before Plumbers begins!), 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 years Plumbers events will include:

• Status of the PREEMPT_RT Merge
• Merge – what is missing and who can help?
• New tools for PREEMPT_RT analysis.
• How do we teach the rest of the kernel developers how not to break PREEMPT_RT?
• Stable maintainers tools discussion & improvements.
• The usage of PREEMPT_RT on safety critical-systems: what do we need to do?
• Interrupt threads are RT and are not protected by the RT Throttling. How can we prevent interrupt thread starvation from a rogue RT task?

We hope to see you there!