A measurement-based analysis of the real-time performance of linux

This paper presents an experimental study of the latency behavior of the Linux OS. We identify major sources of latency in the kernel with the goal of providing real-time performance in a widely used general-purpose operating system. We quantify, each source of latency with a series of micro-benchmarks and also evaluate the effects of latency on a time-sensitive application. Our analysis shows that there are two main causes of latency in the OS: tinier resolution and non-preemptable sections. Our experiments show that in the standard Linux kernel the tinier resolution latency is predominant, and generally hides the non-preemptable section latency We use accurate timers to reduce timer resolution latency and then analyze the non-preemptable section latency for several variants of Linux.