News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Gassée: Thank God Apple chose NeXT over my BeOS by 4ad on Saturday November 12, 2011 @10:18AM (#3227947)
BeOS was definitely a real time OS. BeOS had two scheduling classes, threads with a priority level between 1-99 were time shared threads where the quantum was proportional with 2^priority_level, threads with a priority level between 100 and 120 were real time threads, they could preempt any other thread, including any kernel thread, they were locked to a CPU and never preempted. And when a real time thread was created, it preempted any time shared thread immediately, the scheduler run at creation, it wasn't only added to a scheduling queue like time shared threads.

QNX is a still very popular realtime OS in the embedded world today. Btw, the OS run by the BlackBerry devices is QNX. Usually you'll find QNX in control systems like avionics.

Re:Gassée: Thank God Apple chose NeXT over my BeOS by jonhohle on Saturday November 12, 2011 @10:51AM (#3228009)
From what I've read, "realtime" threads with higher priority could preempt other realtime threads, meaning they could be pre-empted.
Re:Gassée: Thank God Apple chose NeXT over my BeOS by 4ad on Saturday November 12, 2011 @11:04AM (#3228040)
That's true of every other RTOS out there, in fact, it's required to be this way in order to provide deterministic latency.