Canonical Puts Real-Time Ubuntu Into General Availability as it Seeks to Dominate the AIoT

Canonical has announced general availability of an officially-supported real-time kernel for its popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, with which it's hoping to make a splash in the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) market.

"The real-time Ubuntu kernel delivers industrial-grade performance and resilience for software-defined manufacturing, monitoring, and operational tech," claims Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's chief executive officer. "Ubuntu is now the world's best silicon-optimized AIOT platform on NVIDIA, Intel, MediaTek, and AMD-Xilinx silicon."

Designed with a focus on industrial, telecommunication, automotive, and embedded workloads where accurate timing is critical, real-time Ubuntu isn't a new operating system but simply a new version of the Linux kernel for Canonical's existing Ubuntu distribution. Based on Linux 5.15, real-time Ubuntu's kernel is built using out-of-tree PREEMPT_RT patches to provide upper bounds to execution time and pre-emptive capabilities designed to meet the need for determinism — meaning things happen exactly when they're expected to happen, never before or after.

At launch, the real-time kernel is available in two Ubuntu variants: Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS, the latest long-term support (LTS) version of the distribution, and Ubuntu Core 22, a containerized distribution designed for embedded devices at the edge. The latter, however, will only be accessible to "enterprise customers" — and the former available only to Ubuntu Pro subscribers, though with a free tier which Canonical says will be applicable to "personal and small-scale commercial use." Thus far, only x86 and Arm support has been confirmed.

Those interested in trying the software out can read more on the Ubuntu blog, or register for Canonical's upcoming real-time Ubuntu webinar.