The increasing functional and nonfunctional requirements of real-time applications, the advent of mixed criticality computing, and the necessity of reducing costs are leading to an increase in the interest for employing COTS hardware in real-time domains. In this scenario, the Linux kernel is emerging as a valuable solution on the software side, thanks to the rich support for hardware devices and peripherals, along with a well-established programming environment. However, Linux has been developed as a general-purpose operating system, followed by several approaches to introduce actual real-time capabilities in the kernel. Among these, the PREEMPT_RT patch, developed by the kernel maintainers, has the goal to increase the predictability and reduce the latencies of the kernel directly modifying the existent kernel code. This article aims at providing a survey of the state-of-the-art approaches for building real-time Linux-based systems, with a focus on PREEMPT_RT, its evolution, and the challenges that should be addressed in order to move PREEMPT_RT one step ahead. Finally, we present some applications and use cases that have already benefited from the introduction of this patch.

Tolerating hardware faults in modern architectures is becoming a prominent problem due to the miniaturization of the hardware components, their increasing complexity, and the necessity to reduce costs. Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance approaches have been developed to improve system dependability regarding hardware faults without resorting to custom hardware solutions. However, these come at the expense of making the satisfaction of the timing constraints of the applications/activities harder from a scheduling standpoint. This article surveys the current state-of-the-art of fault tolerance approaches when used in the context of real-time systems, identifying the main challenges and the cross-links between these two topics. We propose a joint scheduling-failure analysis model that highlights the formal interactions among software fault tolerance mechanisms and timing properties. This model allows us to present and discuss many open research questions with the final aim to spur future research activities.

The problem of estimating a tight and safe Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET), needed for certification in safety-critical environment, is a challenging problem for modern embedded systems. A possible solution proposed in past years is to exploit statistical tools to obtain a probability distribution of the WCET. These probabilistic real-time analyses for WCET are, however, subject to errors, even when all the applicability hypotheses are satisfied and verified. This is caused by the uncertainties of the probabilistic-WCET distribution estimator. This article aims at improving the measurement-based probabilistic timing analysis approach providing some techniques to analyze and deal with such uncertainties. The so-called region of acceptance model based on state-of-the-art statistical test procedures is defined over the distribution space parameters. From this model, a set of strategies is derived and discussed to provide the methodology to deal with the trade-off safety/tightness of the WCET estimation. These techniques are then tested over real datasets, including industrial safety-critical applications, to show the increased value of using the proposed approach in probabilistic WCET analyses.