Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Guillaume Serriesand today I explain to you how Ubuntu goes real-time and IoT by modifying its kernel.
Most of you know Ubuntu as a computer operating system. It is indeed one of the flagship distributions of Linux for workstations. Others know Ubuntu for its Server version, or for its cloud version.
But Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, is also a very serious player in the field of the Internet of Things, that is to say the IoT, for “Internet of Things” in good English. And it is on this dimension of Ubuntu that we are looking today. Listen up, it’s worth the detour. Because with its latest IoT release, Ubuntu Core 22, Canonical is putting real-time processing on the table.
The “real time” trend
So there, watch out! The term “real-time processing” has become so fashionable that you can find anything under the hood. So be careful when you hear about real time. Real-time processing is when a program or operating system is fast enough to guarantee a reaction to data in a very tight timeframe.
Typically, real-time processing provides results ranging from microseconds, or one-millionths of a second, to milliseconds, or one-thousandths of a second.
And to give you a comparison, human beings have an average reaction time of about 250 milliseconds.
Microsecond and millisecond
So, what is it for ? Well, some computer applications need low latency to perform well. And therefore give results to the microsecond. This is the case of high frequency stock market trading applications, known as “high frequency trading” in English.
Much more common millisecond real-time processing is used in banking and telecommunications applications, digital ad networks and self-driving cars.
To put real-time processing in Ubuntu, Canonical modified its kernel. Concretely, the real-time scheduler can now preempt threads in the kernel to make it more reactive.
Snaps in Ubuntu
Although still in beta, the Ubuntu Core 22 real-time kernel lets you start working on IoT, industrial, telecom, automotive, and robotics applications.
Beyond the real-time promise, Ubuntu Core breaks the monolithic Ubuntu Linux image into packages or containers known as snaps. This includes the kernel, the operating system as such and the applications. Each Snap runs in a sandbox that includes app dependencies to make it fully portable and reliable.
Each device running Ubuntu Core thus has its own dedicated IoT application store. Users and developers can therefore have control of the applications running on their devices.
Ubuntu Core also guarantees OTA (over-the-air) updates of all components, from kernel to applications and vice versa. Enough to improve the security of connected objects.