Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!longway!std-unix From: ahby@bungia.bungia.mn.org (Shane P. McCarron) Newsgroups: comp.std.unix Subject: Standards Update, Part 6: IEEE 1003.4 Message-ID: <274@longway.TIC.COM> Date: 11 Dec 88 16:46:40 GMT Sender: std-unix@longway.TIC.COM Reply-To: Shane P. McCarron Lines: 68 Approved: jsq@longway.tic.com (Moderator, John S. Quarterman) [ 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: __________ |= UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T in the U.S. and other countries. - 2 - Sol Kavy Hewlett-Packard 19477 Pruneridge Cupertino, CA 95014 sol@hpda.hp.com hpda!sol +1 (408) 477-6395 Volume-Number: Volume 15, Number 42