Re:Arm Announces Cortex-R82: First 64-Bit Real Time Processor
by jancsika on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @11:29PM
(#24416718)
Yeah, it would be nice to have a real-life example with a relatively lengthy latency. Perhaps with delivering an organ for a transplant or something.
At least wrt soft realtime scheduling for audio, I think users/programmers tend to get severely tripped up because the latencies are simply too small for them to make a clear mental model of the underlying system. That, along with their ineluctable desire for their code to "go faster" drives them to request features or design algorithms which would have to travel "back to the future" in order to work at all.
So it would be nice to decouple "ultra-low latency" from "realtime" to make it clear that, say, you can't put the heart on ice after the helicopter already lifted off to fly it to the hospital.
A task would usually be considered realtime to some degree if it cannot automatically get its work done on time even when competing with a background-priority long-running job—for example, if your deadlines are operating on similar or smaller timescales to the operating system's CPU scheduler. Then you need to start taking extra measures to ensure adequate responsiveness, not just adequate throughput.
But there's also the aspect of consequences of missing a deadline. Most realtime tasks are concerned with millisecond or shorter timescales, but a job that must be performed once every 108 minutes to prevent the end of the world would also be reasonably considered a realtime task.