Operating System Noise in the Linux Kernel

Another important step in my wish to reduce the gap between real-time Linux and real-time systems research: a paper about the design and implementation of the Linux kernel osnoise tracer, and the osnoise utility on rtla, was accepted by the IEEE Transactions on Computer Journal.

The paper title is Operating system noise in the Linux Kernel. From the paper’s summary:

This paper discusses the internal aspects of Linux that influence the Operating System Noise from a timing perspective. It also presents Linux’s osnoise tracer, an in-kernel tracer that enables the measurement of the Operating System Noise as observed by a workload, and the tracing of the sources of the noise, in an integrated manner, facilitating the analysis and debugging of the system. Finally, this paper presents a series of experiments demonstrating both Linux’s ability to deliver low OS noise (in the single-digit μs order), and the ability of the proposed tool to provide precise information about root-cause of timing-related OS noise problems.

You can download the accepted version of the paper here, or via IEEE Early Access page.