Today at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat announced the official release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG V1 (Messaging Realtime Grid) [1]. A couple snippets of note:

"The Realtime component of Red Hat Enterprise MRG comprises numerous kernel enhancements that provide deterministic performance for time-critical and latency-sensitive applications."

"IBM has worked together closely with Red Hat on the development of the real time Linux kernel and has optimized both WebSphere Real Time and BladeCenter servers on Red Hat Enterprise MRG. We are delighted that IBM and Raytheon have been recognized by Red Hat for this innovation which has led to the largest deployment of real time technology in the next generation of US Navy Destroyers." --Jeff Smith, vice president, Open Source and Linux Middleware at IBM

Red Hat is the second vendor to announce an "Enterprise" Real-Time Linux offering (one that runs real-time applications in addition to all the workloads traditionally associated with an "Enterprise" distribution). Novell/SUSE has recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 Service Pack 2 [2]. The availability of two COTS (commodity, off-the-shelf) offerings marks the beginning of a new era, one of "Real-Time for the Masses". More than two years ago IBM began working with Raytheon on the DDG 1000 project, mentioned by Jeff Smith above, to prepare Real-Time Linux and WebSphere Realtime for use on next generation of US Navy Destroyers. I have enjoyed working closely with the RT folks at Red Hat in preparation for the release of MRG, and am excited to see more and more Enterprise applications take advantage of what Real-Time Linux has to offer.

1. Red Hat MRG V1 Press Release
2. SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 Sevice Pack 2