Preparing the exam...

Are you ready for the exam? Check it yourself, by answering the following questions:

• What is a real-time system? What is the difference between a soft real-time task and a hard real-time task? What is a real-time task?
• Given a task set {T1=(2, 9, 12), T2=(3, 10, 7), T3=(3, 12), T4=(5, 30, 25)}, is it schedulable? What changes if T2 and T4 share a resource, used by T2 for at most 3 time units, and used by T4 for at most 1 time unit?
• Given a real-time application composed by some periodic tasks, how would you implement it? (how would you schedule the tasks, implement them, which OS would you use, etc...)
• You have a real-time application composed by periodic tasks, and you verify that the task set is schedulable by RM. However, when you implement the application on a real system, you see some missed deadlines... What happened?
• What is priority inversion? Why is it a problem? How can we address such a problem?
• RTAI has better real-time performance than traditional Linux... Why?
• What's the difference between a real-time kernel and a non-real-time one?
• What is a cross-compiler? Why is it needed? How can I build one?