Elettrolinux

OSADL coordinates the development of open source projects in the areas of embedded and industrial design, including projects focused on real-time and safety-critical Linux, real-time Ethernet, and special automation-related drivers. The general goal of the OSADL is to promote and coordinate the development of Open Source software for the machine, machine tool, and automation industry: "The automation industry and its suppliers are profiting greatly from Open Source operating systems such as Linux since they guarantee long production cycles, rapid troubleshooting and the independence of individual software manufacturers. However, this branch requires specific expansions of the operating system such as real-time capabilities, the compatibility with these expansions must be certifiable, and standardized software interfaces must be available. The development of these requirements is the goal of the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL)". This project was launched to assist the production of comparable benchmarks on as much different hardware platforms as possible and to evaluate the performance of a Realtime Kernel is a demanding task. The need of unexperienced users to get a first impression of a Realtime Linux system was a second incitement to start the project. The result is a Live CD based on Knoppix and containing an up-to-date Realtime Kernel: the system is directly booted from the CD as described in the corresponding OSADL project. An automatically started benchmark tool will run a measurement of the scheduling latency during one minute. To simulate high system stress, a CPU load of nearly hundred percent is produced by a tool called hackbench. The result is visualized in a GNUPlot diagram marking the worst-case scheduling latency. If you want to try it click here.