Comparing the Real-Time Performance of Windows NT to an NT Real-Time Extension

  • Authors:
  • Kevin M. Obenland;Tiffany Frazier;Jin S. Kim;John Kowalik

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • RTAS '99 Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Because of the dominance of Microsoft (r) Windows (r) in the PC market there is a strong interest in using Windows NT (r) as a platform for real-time process and control systems. This type of solution is very cost effective because applications and development tools are widely available. However, Windows NT was designed as a general purpose operating system and optimizes average not worst case performance.In this paper we investigate two methods for bring real-time process and control systems to NT based platforms. We first evaluate NT as-is, using a series of real-time benchmarks, and show that NT use in real-time systems is limited to soft real-time systems where there is low system load. The second approach for developing NT based real-time systems is to add a real-time extension to NT. We evaluate one such product, INtime (r) from RadiSys and conclude that, even under a heavy system load, hard real-time determinism is possible.