An Empirical Evaluation of OS Support for Real-time CORBA Object Request Brokers
David L. Levine, Sergio Flores-Gaitan, Douglas C. Schmidt · 1998
There is increasing demand to extend Object Request Broker (ORB) middleware to support distributed applications with stringent real-time requirements. However, lack of proper OS support can yield substantial inefficiency and unpredictability for ORB middleware. This paper provides two contributions to the study of OS support for real-time ORBs. First, we empirically compare and evaluate the suitability of real-time operating systems, VxWorks and LynxOS, and general-purpose operating systems with real-time extensions, Windows NT, Solaris, and Linux, for real-time ORB middleware. While holding the hardware and ORB constant, we vary the operating system and measure platform-specific variations, such as latency, jitter, operation throughput, and CPU processing overhead. Second, we describe key areas where these operating systems must improve to support predictable, efficient, and scalable ORBs. Our findings illustrate that general-purpose operating systems like Windows NT and Solaris are n...