# FreeBSD as RTOS?



## grawp (Aug 9, 2010)

Can FreeBSD be used as hard or soft RTOS? I know there are some kernel real-time extensions but that's all I know and somehow can't find more informations.

Can FreeBSD provide some guarantee that scheduler will switch to certain process under the maximum certain time after it becomes ready, etc....?

Anyway, where I can find more about the FreeBSD kernel and multitasking? I'm going to buy IGEPv2 or similar ~1 GHz AMR computer and want to do some time-critical IO operations and communication along with heavy-load such as video compressing.

I'd really like to avoid using Linux (RTAI) because of its creepy license, so I'm looking for other *nix learning & development platform.


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## grawp (Sep 10, 2010)

FreeBSD as well as NetBSD can be used as realtime OS. They both have fully preemptive kernel (and POSIX realtime extensions).
I've chosen NetBSD as learning platform. There are whole documentation section regarding NetBSD internals + NetBSD supports many more architectures and that's very important to me. I couldn't find such documentation in FreeBSD. Anyway FreeBSD seems to be more desktop/server oriented OS.


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## lme@ (Sep 10, 2010)

You might get some proficient replies from from the hackers@ mailing list.


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