Canonical Announces Availability of Real-Time Kernel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS - 9to5Linux

Why would it increase your energy bill?

Who a good boy? You a good boy!

So, contrary to what it seems a single CPU core can only execute a single "thing" at a time. Modern operating systems do something called "preemptive multitasking" to give the illusion that more than one things are running at a time. The OS will start your task, then after a while save its state and start another task running, then switch back. It does this fast enough that each job seems to be running concurrently.

Now if you're running on a RaspberryPI your program might be waiting for input from a GPIO pin. And when you get that input you want to turn on some switch. Maybe an important switch. BUT It could be that your application is in the "paused" state when that pin gets input which will cause a delay between when the pin is trying to send you input and when you actually process it.

A real-time OS minimizes such delays (latency) so that you can respond quickly.

An alternative definition: a real-time system is a system where the correctness of the computation depends on a deadline. For example, if I have a drone checking "with my current location + velocity will I crash into the wall in 5 seconds?", the answer will be worthless if the system responds 10 seconds later.

A real-time kernel is an operating system that makes it easier to build such systems. The main difference is that they offer lower latency than a usual OS for your one critical program. The OS will try to give that program as much priority as it wants (to the detriment of everything else) and immediately handle all signals ASAP (instead of coalescing/combining them to reduce overhead)

Linux has real-time priority scheduling as an optional feature. Lowering latency does not always result in reduced overhead or higher throughout. This allows system builders to design RT systems (such as audio processing systems, robots, drones, etc) to utilize these features without annoying the hell out of everyone else.

Music recording? Idk

Basically tasks have a tight window of execution latency guarantee (although they can exceed that as Linux is not a deterministic hard realtime kernel)

This means potentially lower performance and other losses but it provides very low latency, which is useful for some tasks that need low latency due to their nature like high quality professional audio

Perhaps because it takes time, resources and workforce to build another kernel version. Not to mention Ubuntu Pro is actually free. But then again, I know we're just supposed to hate Ubuntu here.