The TTY layer, the past, present and future

Thomas Gleixner has said recently, “Good luck fixing the TTY layer”, when it comes to real-time issues and the Linux kernel. The TTY layer is one of the few remaining portions of the kernel that date from the pre 1.0 kernel days, and is a complex beast due to all of the requirements put on it.

This talk will dive a bit into the past of the tty layer, showing that it was one of the main reasons that Linux succeeded as well as it has, describe the current implementation in broad terms, and then dive into the potential future changes that could allow people to no longer be so scared of this layer, and maybe, just maybe get it to work properly in real-time systems.

Greg KH