Novell Readies Updates to Real Time Edition of SUSE Linux

Published: July 10, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last fall, commercial Linux distributor Novell started shipping a special flavor of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 operating system that was geared toward so-called "real time" applications. Now that Service Pack 1 for SLES 10 is shipping, SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, or SLERT 10, is being updated with that SP1 functionality and some other goodies.

SLERT 10 was developed in conjunction with real time operating system expert Concurrent Computer, and it is only available on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 processors, unlike SLES 10 itself, which runs on Power, Itanium, and mainframe processors as well. SLERT 10 has special tweaks to the Linux kernel that give it a predictable interrupt response time of under 30 microseconds, as well as a high-resolution timer that allows for much more sophisticated kernel scheduling. SLERT also has processor shielding and allows user-level control of simultaneous multithreading on the chips that have this feature (Intel's Core architecture processors have SMT, which it calls HyperThreading, while Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and Opteron processors do not have SMT. The SP1 tweaks to SLES 10 a few weeks ago and now SLERT 10 offer support for quad-core processors from both Intel and AMD as well as tweaks for improved paravirtualization support in the Xen hypervisor integrated into SLES 10.

Both SLES 10 SP1 and SLERT 10 SP1 will support a set of open source software drivers for InfiniBand adapters called the Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution 1.2. InfiniBand connectivity specialist Voltaire also has announced that it will work with Novell to create and co-market a bundle of SLERT 10 SP1, Voltaire's Grid Backbone InfiniBand switches, the OFED 1.2 software drivers, and other bits from Voltaire to create a low-latency, high-throughput clustered solution for stock and other kinds of trading systems. Novell also said that SLERT 10 SP1 would support Concurrent's NightStar analysis and debugging tools for real-time operating systems.

The SP1 tweaks for SLERT 10 will ship sometime this month--Novell did not say when.

The company did, however, say that it was working on a kicker to SLERT 10 SP1 and that it was looking for enterprises to participate in a beta program for the product. While not spilling the beans too much, Novell said that the kicker to SLERT would focus on lowering latency and boosting performance further, and not just on applications with a relatively small number of threads that can be prioritized or shielded by the kernel, but on applications with a large number of threads, such as complex Java applications that have a lot of messaging between JVMs, application servers, and other elements of the system. Novell is, along with other members of the open source community, working on kernel locking, priority inheritance, execution interrupts in kernel threads, and finer-grained timers to improve the performance of real-time Linux. If you want to get in line to test this future SLERT, follow this link and sign up for the beta program.

SLERT 10 costs $2,895 per server, spanning from 1 to 32 processor cores. Customers with SLES 10 can upgrade to SLERT 10 for $2,500 extra per server. The SP1 patches are automatically available to anyone who is on a maintenance contract.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published. We did the math backwards on the difference in price between SLERT 10 and SLES 10. It does not cost only a few hundred bucks to upgrade from SLES 10 to SLERT 10, but rather $2,500 per server. IT Jungle regrets the error. [Corrected 7/12/07]

RELATED STORIES

Novell Ships Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux 10

Novell Ships SLERT Variant of SUSE Linux

Novell, Concurrent Create Real-Time SUSE Linux Variant

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