Why is stock Windows NT unsuitable as a real-time system?
Microsoft Windows NT has been designed as a general-purpose operating system, suitable for use both as an interactive system on the desktop and as a server system on a network [Solomon 98]. The shortcomings of NT in real-time applications have been thoroughly researched [Ramamritham 98] [Timmerman & Monfret 96]: • Too few thread priorities. • Opaque and non-deterministic scheduling decisions. • Priority inversion, particularly in interrupt processing. The logic of RTX design is dictated by several factors. The stock NT operating system is a mass-market product, not readily tweaked for niche applications like real-time. While Microsoft-sponsored research into real-time NT has produced some interesting results [Sommer 96], especially for cases when applications advertise their resource requirements in advance [Sommer 97][Sommer & Potter 96], it is doubtful that this operating system, aiming for a very broad market, should absorb the overhead and complexity of real-time functionality [Mic
