About Us
Foundation Members
The Real Time Linux Foundation, Inc, is composed of regular members, sponsors, a board of directors, a panel of technical consultants and a treasurer.
The board consists of 5 positions:
Qingguo Zhou, president;
Peter Wurmsdobler, vice-president, organizer of the real time Linux workshops, mainainer of the Foundation's web site;
Kevin Bayhouse, general secretary and treasurer;
A N Other, vacancy.
A N Other, vacancy.
Administration is handled by our Professional Staff:
Kevin Bayhouse , Foundation Manager.
The Panel of Technical Consultants will cover the areas of:
Nicholas McGuire, systems administrator and organizer of the real time Linux workshops;
A N Other, web master
A N Other, API standardization
A N Other, Testing and quality evaluation
A N Other, Documentation
A N Other, Networking
A N Other, Device drivers
A N Other, Ports to other platforms
Historical Perspective
There are, have been, and will be a lot of groups spread over the world developing modifications to the Linux kernel in order to provide a real time operating system, either as hard read time kernel underneath the Linux kernel, or as patches to the kernel in order to provide soft real time: different versions for different needs and target applications. The intention to install a common platform, the Real Time Linux Foundation, has different historical roots:
In the beginning there were only mailing lists and web-sites;
The first real time Linux workshop in Vienna 1999 brought together developers, users and interested people from university and industry. One of the workshop's objective was to install a web-site and a common platform.
At about the same time, Phil Daly and others started to write a book on real time Linux systems providing a unified view of the existing real time implementations. This book was (and is) to be open content and a portion of the royalties were set aside for an organization tentatively called the Real Time Linux Foundation.
Peter Wurmsdobler announced the creation of the Real Time Linux Consortium in 2001 in order to establish a discussion platform for real time Linux.
The natural consequence of these turns of events was a discussion and decision at the real time Linux workshop in Orlando 2001 to create the Real Time Linux Foundation as a balanced, impartial nonprofit organization which is vendor neutral, but offers an entry point to real time Linux for documentation, discussion, sample applications and vendors of real time Linux related services.
Mission Statement
The goals of the Real Time Linux Foundation are:
to serve as an entry point for newcomers to the real time Linux community;
to bring together all interested parties in open discussion on implementation and standardization;
to provide good documentation on existing implementations, solutions and projects;
to identify companies providing real time Linux services and solutions;
to create a positive feedback loop between real time Linux developers, users, industry and academia for promoting fast development;
to make real time Linux the number one choice for real time operating systems and help to make open source enter the embedded and real time marketplace.