[comp.realtime] Is RhealStone for real?

schmitz@fas.ri.cmu.edu (Donald Schmitz) (11/28/89)

For at least the last year, I've heard rumors of a real-time system
benchmark in the works, called Rhealstone (sp?), however I've never seen any
references or results.  Does anyone know if the benchmark project is for
real, still under development, etc?

If not, what are YOU using for benchmarking systems?  Seems lots of people
use task switch times, but this doesn't tell you much about the scheduler
performance, or even overall utilization, since it is easy to strip the
context switch code down by moving the scheduling/sorting somewhere else.
If you don't have any formal benchmarks, how about an informal poll as to
typical job mixes (I'll collect mailed responses and summarize if there is
interest).  In particular, for your application, what are:

 o number, rate, and duration of periodic tasks

 o acceptable clock skew in task execution

 o long and short term utilization

 o number, rate, latency and computation requirements of interrupts 
   and their handlers

 o number of active processes

 o number of exclusion protected resources and duration of locked accesses

 o number (and type) of processor

As you may have guessed, we are working on our own real-time kernel, and
wonder how well some of our design decisions work in real applications, as
opposed to handling pathological cases or yielding blazing fast context
switch times.  All responses greatly appreciated.

Don Schmitz (schmitz@fas.ri.cmu.edu)