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Lineo Pays To License Real-Time Linux Capability

Posted by timothy on from the now-how-much-would-you-pay?- dept.

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."

2 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Not the only (or best) game on the market by cduffy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    [Disclaimer: I work for MontaVista, and so am as biased as they come]

    Interesting, that is. However, I doubt it'll gain them much.

    MontaVista has been doing work on real-time Linux also -- not by putting another layer on top of or underneath the kernel, but by making it highly preemptible. Nigel Gamble (the fellow who did IRIX's real-time capabilities) has put together a patch which permits for some extremely low latencies. There are some other folks here working on the same thing. This has side-benefits for folks running SMP boxen, even if they don't need real-time capabilities, by making the spinlocks much more fine-grained. This patch is truly open source, and will hopefully some day make it into the mainline kernel.

    We've recently inked a deal with Concurrent (http://www.ccur.com/corporate/pr/pr_208.html) that real-time folks might find interesting (as Concurrent has some interesting tools) and much of our real-time work has been known to readers of linux-kernel for quite some time. Additionally, our real-time patches are included in the kernels distributed with our products.

    Note that I'm on a different project, so my knowledge of the real-time work we do is quite fuzzy. Suffice to say that we've got a highly preemptible Linux kernel already, and that it's still being improved. Hopefully someone else from MontaVista with better direct knowledge will also post.

  2. Hey, what about a sense of history here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Years ago, IBM had a realtime system kernel that ran on 360/370/43xx hardware called CP or control program. You ran the os of your choice on a virtual machine presented to you by CP. Oddly enough one of the uses for this was a port of UNIX to 360/370 type hardware. Others were typically VM-CMS for virtual machine cambridge monitor system aka virtual machine conversational monitor system, cics or "kicks" to name a few. Why is this not prior art where in one runs an ordinary os on top of a real time kernel? Why is the Yodaiken patent invalidated by the prior art of IBM? Would IBM license its rights to the same idea and reduction to art to the Linux community now that IBM is big on Linux? Why do we have to tolerate bogus patents and constant shake downs by those with the bogus patents. I thought the burden of showing the non-existance of prior art was on the potential patent filer and not the rest of us. Just asking. Does anyone else know of similar but different prior art for the so-called new idea of running an os as a task on a realtime kernel? Basically I am for innovation but it has the odd property that it has to be new.