Booting Linux quickly is highly desirable for embedded devices, particularly those that are battery-powered or require high availability. A common approach for reducing boot times with minimal effort is to remove unused features, effectively turning a general purpose operating system into a specialised one. However, this compromise of sacrificing features for boot time reduces flexibility …
Tag: PREEMPT_RT
Improving real-time performance with the Realtime Linux Analysis Tool (RTLA)
“Real-Time” can be defined as a system’s ability to to respond to inputs or events in a timely manner, in order to meet an imposed timing “deadline”. Failure to meet the deadline in a Hard Real-Time system is a catastrophic failure. In a Soft Real-Time system, however, occasional deadline violations are permitted, the occurrences of …
Embedded Recipes 2025
Embedded Recipes is a conference held in Nice, France which focuses on open-source embedded systems. It’s organisers accurately describe the conference as “talks, workshops, discussions, food, friends and the beach”. The Good Penguin attended (and sponsored) the event and in this blog post we’ll share our highlights. The CRA and what it means for us …
The Impact of Non-Blocking Consoles (nbcon) on Linux Boot Time
During the Linux boot process, the boot console is responsible for relaying boot messages to the user. On embedded systems this console is often attached to a serial port that can only handle a maximum data rate of a few kilobytes per second which degrades overall boot time. In this post we’ll explore how the …