Lineo Pays To License Real-Time Linux Capability

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Embedded linux vendor Lineo has apparently caved in to Victor Yodaiken, and become the first software company to publicly announce the licensing of Yodaiken's patented process for running a general purpose operating system (such as Linux) as a task under a real-time kernel(such as RTLinux or RTAI)."

There's a special report at LinuxDevices which includes . . .

• text of the Lineo press release
• comments from Victor Yodaiken
• news of a non-patented open source alternative ("Adeos")
• a reference list about RTLinux and the RTLinux patent
• a whitepaper about Adeos

There's an interesting quote where Yodaiken claims his patent will help open source."

Comments

Re:1 and 0 patent

[Tim Macinta]

Where can I patent the use of 0 and 1 as a representation of logic?

It looks like somebody has beaten you to it.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I need a pulse to my heart every 50 milliseconds, then I wanna know that I can play quake on my pacemaker, and open a thousand Mozilla windows, and the worst that'll happen is that the mozilla windows will hardly ever get a timeslice. I want to know that if the kernel cant' read/write to an area of RAM, it's guaranteed not to miss a beat while it waits for the read request to "time out" -- every POSSIBLE time out is guaranteed to be fast enough to allow the scheduler to fulfill the promised tasks. Or, if you want to think of it in different terms, the system has to be in such a state that there will always be 0 latency between moving the mouse and seeing the cursor move on screen....that's very very very difficult to do. To "guarantee" that. Sure, it may be /usually/ like that, but you really need "proving algorithms" to guarantee you that each function you enter is made up of subfunctions that, when added up, are under the quota for the function. One of the things that this means is that you can't just have a generic "sort" function -- because it takes longer to sort a million records than it does just one. In other words, everything has to be in "constant time" -- and provably so. (In other words, you can forget about using the cos() function in math.h if you're not guaranteed that it will be constant time for values of null, 0, 1, 300, -32012, or any other value, acceptible or non-acceptible, including all possible error handling. That's hard.