Real-time operation of Mach microkernel?

[John Wason]

Hello,

I am a robotics engineer and find Hurd's design interesting.  It is 
difficult to run robotic software on a full operating system because the 
kernel is way to complicated to specialize for a real-time robot 
system.  Real-time linux does exist, but you still end up dealing with 
all the complexity of linux at the low-level control loop.  Are there 
any plans for doing a real-time version of the Mach kernel?  I think it 
would actually be a "relatively minor" change to a microkernel when 
compared to the full linux kernel.  Basically certain callback function 
would need to be executed at exactly the right time, and have the 
ability to read and write to hardware very quickly at a low level.  I 
curretly use a program that is more or less dos, and uses raw pci 
equivalents of "inp" and "outp".  Some DMA control may be useful as well.

   -John