Standards Update, Part 6: IEEE 1003.4

[Shane P. McCarron]

[ These Standards Updates are published after each IEEE 1003
meeting, and are commissioned by the USENIX Association.
See Part 1 for contact information.  -mod ]


      An update on UNIX|= Standards Activities - Part 6

                    POSIX 1003.4 Update

                     November 18, 1988

           Shane P. McCarron, NAPS International

1003.4 - Real Time Extensions to POSIX

In the past I have written some things about this committee
that were pretty critical.  I saw them as progressing too
slowly to have the impact I hoped they would have.  I know
that nothing I wrote or said motivated them, but I am now
happy to report the following:  1003.4 is almost ready to go
to mock ballot!  Apparently it all came together in the last
couple of months, and they are now ready to ask a wider
group for an opinion.  They plan, at the January meeting, to
go through all of their working papers and appendices,
integrate them into the draft, and them submit it for a mock
ballot before the April meeting.  The results of the trial
ballot will tell them how much more work they need to do
before going to formal ballot.  If all goes well, they
should be able to ballot after the July, 1989 meeting.
Given the way ballots tend to go, that would mean a
completed standard in early to mid 1990.  This is
particularly exciting since previously dates in 1991 had
been bandied about.  Getting this standard out a full year
earlier is astounding.

Many people are probably curious as to what is contained in
a Real Time standard.  Well, many things that didn't make it
into 1003.1, for starters.  Here is a partial list:
Asynchronous I/O, Shared Memory, IPC, Asynchronous Event
Notification, Process Memory Locking, Timers, Priority
Scheduling, Semaphores, Synchronous I/O, and Realtime Files

Some of these are going to be particularly contentious.  In
particular Events and Memory Locking could be a problem.
The mock balloting should flush out these issues so it can
be cleaned up before formal balloting in the fall.

The Watchdog committee contact for 1003.4 is Sol Kavy:  He
can be reached at:

__________

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                           - 2 -

          Sol Kavy
          Hewlett-Packard
          19477 Pruneridge
          Cupertino, CA  95014
          sol at hpda.hp.com
          hpda!sol
          +1 (408) 477-6395


Volume-Number: Volume 15, Number 42