Speaker: Fabian Renn-Giles, Dave Rowland

Audience level: Intermediate | Advanced

“Real-time” is a term that gets used a lot, but what does it really mean to different industries? What happens when our “real-time” system doesn’t perform in real-time? And how can we ensure that we don’t get in to this situation?

This talk is presented in two parts. The first will discuss what we mean by a real-time system, the practices that can be used to try and make sure it stays real-time and in particular how these can be subtly or accidentally abused increasing the risk of violating your real-time constraints. We’ll take a look at some of the considerations for real-time systems and the costs they involve such as system calls, allocations and priority inversion. Then the common tools in a programmer’s box such as mutexes, condition variables and atomics and how these can be deployed effectively. We’ll also look at some common mechanisms built out of these primitives and where they’re most frequently used.

The second part of this talk takes an in-depth look at the difficult problem of synchronization between real-time and non-real-time threads. This talk will share insights, tricks and design patterns, that the author has established over years of real-time audio programming, and has ultimately led to the creation of the open-source farbot library. At the end of this talk, you will be equipped with a set of simple design rules guiding you to the correct solution for various real-time challenges and synchronization situations.