The RTX Real-Time Subsystem for Windows NT

This paper describes a subsystem for the Windows NT 4.0 Operating System which implements a kernel-mode execution environment for Win32 compatible tasks and threads that have hard real-time performance characteristics (deterministic interrupt response and dispatch latencies). This subsystem is a proper OS extension which requires no modifications to the standard OS kernel and limited modifications to the NT Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). This gives the motivation for the approach, describes the design and evaluates the success of the implementation in the context of other strategies for extending general purpose OS kernels.