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Originally Posted by Ry-Fi  Surely this is feasible, no? To anyone's knowledge, have the big OS vendors ever considered making such "near-real-time" versions of their OSes for the omnipresent and ever-growing market where personal computers are the cornerstones of all modern technological crafts ? |
I spent many years working on software and computer architecture for real-time stuff (cell phones, communications, etc.) The thing is that it is not only an OS consideration. Take the Motorola 56K for example (the DSP inside the TDM cards). They don't use the same kind of cache or paging structure that an Intel processor does, for the very reason that their applications require knowing exactly how many cycles such-and-such an operation will take (no iffy stuff about cache misses or page faults or context switches or variable pipeline stalls allowed). So it's a whole system design and not exclusively an OS thing.
But something like Core Audio is very much an OS vendor doing near-real-time stuff in the OS. They lock all kinds of critical pages and processes down and tune them for real-time response, to get as close as is feasible on a general-purpose Intel platform. It works well, don't you think? I mean, there's a fixed latency in a hard real-time system like a 56K-based system too, and it's not much better than what is currently delivered by Core Audio with a high-end interface.
-synthoid