Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 01 Jun 2005 11:33:07 -0400 | From | Karim Yaghmour <> | Subject | Re: RT patch acceptance |
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Andrea,
I've been involved with understanding/fighting this patent for a very long time. I must have read it at least a dozen times. To the best of my understanding as a non-lawyer, I don't see how PREEMPT_RT could fall as being covered by it.
Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > The patent text goes like this "providing a software emulator to disable > and enable interrupts from the general purpose operating system; > > marking interrupts as "soft disabled" and not "soft enabled" in response > to requests from the general purpose operating system to disable > interrupts; ".
What you are refering to is claim #7. The text does resemble this, but it's in a wider context of all the other statements within that claim, the main part being what I quoted earlier.
Now in regards to emulating interrupts in a general purpose OS, then this has been done many times over prior to the patent. Here's one readily available example in the Unix world: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/micro93/stodolsky.html
Please drop this one Andrea.
Karim -- Author, Speaker, Developer, Consultant Pushing Embedded and Real-Time Linux Systems Beyond the Limits http://www.opersys.com || karim@opersys.com || 1-866-677-4546 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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