Enterprise, industry, and developers with specific needs will be interested to know that Ubuntu’s real-time kernel has entered general availability.
Canonical says Real-time Ubuntu is “designed for enterprises in aerospace, automotive, defense, IoT, robotics, and telcos, as well as the public sector and retail”, where access to agile, low-latency computing offered by a deterministic real-time kernel is, excuse the word play, a real-time requirement.
Ubuntu’s real-time kernel is based on the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel offered in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and is available for both x86 and Arm architectures. Canonical note that the Real-time Ubuntu kernel integrates out-of-tree PREEMPT_RT patches to reduce kernel latencies making it ‘more preemptive’ than mainline Linux kernels.
“The real-time Ubuntu kernel delivers industrial-grade performance and resilience for software-defined manufacturing, monitoring and operational tech”, Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, says of the launch.
He adds that “Ubuntu is now the world’s best silicon-optimised AIOT platform on NVIDIA, Intel, MediaTek, and AMD-Xilinx silicon”.
So how do enterprises get real-time Ubuntu 22.04 LTS?
Well, it’s accessed via an Ubuntu Pro subscription, and it is available across most Ubuntu variants. It should also be noted that the real-time kernel cannot be used alongside Livepatch, Canonical’s reboot-free kernel update feature, nor is it compatible on systems with proprietary NVIDIA graphics installed.
Real-time Ubuntu is best used with Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu Core 22 deployments.
More details (and a ton of marketing speak) can be gleaned by reading the Real-time Ubuntu release announcement on the Ubuntu blog.