Wednesday October 25th (Open Plenary)

0900-0910 Introduction -- Andrew Josey, Director Server Platforms, The Open Group -- This session includes an update of the status of the Forum.

0910-0950 Session 1 - Tom Williams, Editor-in-Chief, RTC magazine -- Openness vs. Control: The Engine for Advancing Technology.

This session will look at current marketplace trends for real-time and embedded systems.

0950-1030 Session 2 - Michael Tiemann, Chief Technical Officer, Red Hat Inc., Embedded Linux.

This session will give a status update and overview of EL/IX, an Embedded Linux Specification modeled on the POSIX profiles for embedded systems.

1030 -- Break

1100-1145 Session 3 - Aubrey (Tom) Smith,Director, Open Systems Joint Task Force , US Department of Defense -- Requirements for Real-time and Embedded systems

This session will discuss the the requirements for real-time and embedded systems from a customer perspective, highlighting the importance of conformance testing.

1145 -- 1230 Session 4 - The Real-time Specification for Java -- Greg Bollella, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

A preliminary version of the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) has been published by Addison Wesley. Developed under the Java Community Process the RTSJ will not be considered final until a reference implementation and a set of test suites become available (expected mid-2001). This talk covers the rationale for the features of the RTSJ and some technical details of the RTSJ. The RTSJ specifies enhancements to seven areas of the Java Language Specification and the Java Virtual Machine Specification: Scheduling, Memory Management, Synchronization, Asynchronous Event Handling, Asynchronous Transfer of Control, Asynchronous Thread Termination, and Physical Memory Access.

1230-1330 -- Lunch

1330 -- 1410 Session 5 - What's happening in Real-time CORBA -- Dock Allen, The Object Management Group/Mitre Corporation

This session will cover the current status of real-time CORBA and UML. Dock will also provide a look ahead towards specifications currently under development and future plans.

This is also be an opportunity for members to provide feedback to the OMG Realtime SIG on the relative importance of the current initiatives, and what the members would like to see in CORBA.

1410 -- 1455 Session 6 - APIs for Real-time Distributed Applications over IP -- Stan Schneider, President, RTI, Inc.

This session will give an overview of the real-time publish-subscribe (RTPS) communications model. RTPS is a data-distribution communications model expressly designed for high-performance communications over IP networks.

1455 -- 1540 Session 7 - Real-time in Solaris® - An Engineering Overview -- Jim Litchfield, Senior Staff Engineer, Solaris Operating Systems group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

This session covers the features in the Solaris Operating Environment that support real-time, especially in its application to multi-processor systems. Discussion will cover scheduling classes, memory management, timers, processor control and POSIX conformance. Measured response time numbers for the current version of the operating system will be presented.

1540 -- Break

1600 - Panel Session - Moderator , Glen T. Logan, Lt Col, USAF.
The speakers from the plenary will participate in an open panel session answering questions from the audience.

1730 -- End of Plenary

1830 - Buses depart for the Members Dinner

Thursday October 26th (Forum members only)

This session is for members only, or by invitation only

These are working sessions of the Forum, with sessions on the following topics: Certification , the Distributed Real-time Specification for Java , Uniform Driver Interface, New APIs (including a Linux Interest Group), a Microsoft Windows Interest Group, and Security and Real-time and Embedded Systems. The day will be split into two parallel tracks with breakout sessions, with a plenary session at the start of the morning.

0900-0930 -- Plenary 1
Breakout sessions, Track 1 and Track 2 are in Charleston I, Charleston II

0930-1030
Track 1: New APIs / Linux Interest Group (0.5 day) part 1 of 2
Track 2: Uniform Driver Interface (1 hour)
Track 3: Security (90 minutes) -- Room 804

1030 -- Break

1100-1230
Track 1: New APIs / Linux Interest Group Continued part 2 of 2
Track 2:The Distributed Real-time Specification for Java
Track 3: Security --Room 804 Cont'd

1230 -- Lunch

Breakout sessions, Track 1 and Track 2 are in Charleston I, Charleston II

1400-1530
Track 1:Certification Session (0.5 day) part 1 of 2
Track 2:Microsoft Windows Interest Group (90 mins)

1530 -- Break

Track 1:Certification Session part 2 of 2

Session Descriptions

Certification Session: The session will be led by Glen Logan, Open Systems Joint Task Force and James de Raeve, Vice President, Conformance, The Open Group. The session is expected to run for half a day.

This session will consider the high level requirements and target systems for a certification program for testing and certification of real-time and embedded systems. Procedures for running a possible certification will be discussed. Outputs for this session include an outline of the goals for a real-time and embedded systems certification program, and a possible road-map for rolling out a program.

The session will also cover:

• A presentation of testing & certification processes used by The Open Group
• POSIX 1003.13 defines profiles 51 through 54, yet test suites only exist for profile 54 and larger systems. Are the POSIX profiles sufficient for real-world solutions ? Can we use them as building blocks and add further to them?
• Testing embedded systems, which have limited resources, in some cases no filesystem and no support for multiprocessing, gives a new set of challenges to the approach taken for testing. An outline test architecture that overcomes these limitations will be presented.

Uniform Driver Interface Session: This session is being led by Bob Barned, Technical Editor for NCITS R1.1 (Real Time UDI). This session is expected to last one hour.

Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) support for Real Time Operating Systems and Portable Communications Protocol Modules

Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) is a standard for Device Driver Portability. UDI technology is intended to be part of real time operating systems as well as non-real time operating systems. UDI is intended to make communications protocol modules as well as I/O drivers portable.

This session will provide background information about UDI. This will be followed by a discussion of the following more specific topics.

• How UDI relates to real time operating systems
• How UDI will be useful for the development of communications protocol modules
• Conformance test issues

New APIs Session: This session is being led by Mark Gerhardt from TimeSys. This session is expected to run for half a day (and include the Linux Interest Group session below as part of it).

Using sets of APIs in a collective manner introduces constraints, conflicts, and semantic contention that may not have existed when considering each API set alone. For example, consider a messaging system whose monitor wants to run at a very high priority being implemented along with a windowing system which wants operator events to have a reasonable response time. The interaction between the priorities of messaging and windowing needs to be controlled and understood. A new logical API could specify relative qualities of service for response, resource use, and reliability. Particular services and functions within this logical API could internally implement calls to: dynamic changes in the object link adapter within a CORBA framework, calls to a resource kernel to bound CPU utilization (if available), or mapping to a more traditional fixed priority scheduler using priority inheritance for data arbitration in that was available.

Another example is an API to deploy a given service as fault tolerant including redundancy, perhaps including a bounded response requirement for recovery. Such an API could internally construct processes and threads with predictable performance (using RK or RMA and priority scheduling calls), and a real-time CORBA distribution capability between redundant elements.

APIs of this nature should be standardized and unified as APIs, rather than hand-crafted individually and internally within applications as is done today.

An example domain in which this has worked well is the telephone and its migration from a hardwired instrument to cellular phones. The concept of telephone number used to be equated to a hardwired address of a particular phone instrument in a given place. The current definition of a telephone number is a "name service". Depending on the configuration and status of the cell phone at the instant a call is made to it to, the phone may ring (wherever it is located!), a voicemail answering machine may take the call, or the call may be forwarded to an entirely new location and telephone number. What happened here may be viewed as an increase in the abstraction of the API for making a phone call. Similar increases in abstraction should occur to unify the myriad of separate APIs available for use by applications.

Recent efforts within the Object Management Group (OMG) are beginning to ascribe performance expectations to Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Parameters regarding QoS are right now treated independently. New composite unifying APIs need to combine the functionality of, for example, fault tolerance, distribution, name service, low-level messaging, scheduling and invocation in a unified and cohesive manner. The OMG efforts are extremely important correlated work related to the concept of new APIs described here.

These and additional new APIs will be extremely important for the future of complex distributed software bases systems.

Linux Interest Group

This session is meeting in conjunctoin with the New APIs session, and is considering proposals for additional APIs in the areas of Linux real-time and embedded systems. This group is being led by Victor Yodaiken, and we expect participants to include Lineo, TimeSys, MontaVista, and others.

The Distributed Real-time Specification for Java: This session is led by Doug Jensen, Mitre Corporation.

This session is expected to last 90 minutes.

Note, that there may also be a discussion on test requirements for the Real-time Specification for Java.

Session Synopsis: Work has begun on the Distributed Real-Time Specification for Java, as part of Sun's Java Community Process. The approach is based on providing a natural and minimal mechanistic extension to Remote Method Invocation (RMI) to support the end-to-end timeliness (and other) properties of distributed - in the sense of trans-node - behaviors. These timeliness properties must be preserved for any distributed real-time computing system, regardless of its application programming model - whether RPC, mobile objects, or whatever.

Microsoft Windows Interest Group: This session is led by Roy Kok from VenturCom, Inc.

This session is expected to last 90 minutes.

At this session, the current real-time capabilities of Windows systems will be covered, including a case study of the applicability of a Windows solution for military applications, together with an exploration and discussion of requirements for new and extended capabilities.

Security for Real-time and Embedded Systems:

This session is expected to last 90 minutes.