Terminology

1. What is real-time? What is a real-time system?
2. Differentiate hard, firm and soft real-time.
3. Name examples of real-time systems and their timing requirements. What other dimensions for the classification of real-time systems do you see?

Concepts

4. Given the task of designing a system to perform a real-time task, which design steps and decisions can you imagine?
5. How would you determine the execution time of a real-time application?
6. Given a set of tasks with their timing parameters, how can you determine a feasible schedule, where the tasks meet their timing constraints?
7. What operating system functionality could be useful or even required to execute real-time applications?