Meinberg Drivers and Real Time Operating Systems

The term Real Time Operating System (RTOS) is not related to some particular accuracy level of the computer's system time. It just means that the operating system always responds to a specific event within some guaranteed time interval. Real Time doesn't even mean that the maximum response interval for an event has to be particularly short. It is specific to a particular system, and can be a few microseconds, milliseconds, or even tens of milliseconds, depending on the specification for that system. Real Time just guarantees** that the event is always handled within the specified response interval, and this interval is never exceeded.

Often the real time property is also restricted to a couple of particular events that explicitly have to be configured as real time events, e.g. specific interrupt requests triggered by hardware input signals.

Neither native Windows nor native Linux systems are Real Time operating systems. It's possible that they react on an event very fast, but there's no guarantee that an event is always handled within a specific time limit.

For both systems there are some optional RTOS extensions available that let them provide some limited real time support, and current Linux kernels even have some basic functionality included.

However, these RTOS extensions normally don't affect the standard API calls of these operating systems. Otherwise, no standard software could be executed on such systems.

The Meinberg driver software for Linux and Windows also just uses standard API calls to adjust the system time, so the driver software is normally not affected by Real Time extensions for Windows or Linux, and should run without problems.

If in doubt, just try to download and install the driver software packages for these operating systems. If that works, there should be no problems to use the drivers.

There are other specific RTOS systems that may require specific API functions to read the time from a PCI card or to adjust the system time. Meinberg driver software may not be available for such systems, just because specific compilers, build environments and programs would generally be required operating systems that are not yet supported.

If you encounter any problems, or have specific questions, please contact Meinberg support techsupport@meinberg.de.

— Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki@meinberg.de 2020-02-10