The story of Real Time Linux OSADL getting across the finish line is one of the better open-source success stories of recent years, and episode 882 of the FLOSS Weekly podcast puts a human face on it. Host Jonathan sat down with Jan Altenberg of the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) to talk about how a cooperative of people who genuinely care about Linux and open source managed to push real-time capabilities into the mainline kernel, and what comes next for safety-critical systems.
What OSADL Is and Why It Matters for Real Time Linux
OSADL describes itself, in the podcast’s own words, as a cooperative of nerds who care about Linux and open source. Based in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, according to RocketReach, the organisation was founded more than 13 years ago with a specific industrial mission: advancing the use of GNU/Linux in industrial products by tackling the need for real-time capabilities and safety certification. Those are two problems that have historically kept Linux off factory floors, production lines, and embedded control systems where determinism and certified reliability are non-negotiable.
The cooperative model matters here. OSADL is not a single company pushing Linux adoption for commercial gain; it is an industry membership organisation whose members pool effort and resource toward shared engineering goals. That structure has let it do things that would be difficult for any single vendor acting alone, including the long, patient work of getting the PREEMPT_RT patch set into the mainline kernel.
Real Time Linux, backed by OSADL’s sustained effort, finally achieved mainline kernel status, a milestone that the FLOSS Weekly conversation treats as a genuine landmark. For anyone who has followed the PREEMPT_RT saga, that landing matters: it means industrial and embedded developers no longer need to carry an out-of-tree patch and can rely on upstream maintenance going forward.
Safety-Critical Hardening: The Next Frontier for Real Time Linux OSADL Work
With real-time mainlined, OSADL’s attention is turning toward safety-critical hardening, and the organisation has a track record here too. According to the Linux Foundation, OSADL created the OSADL Safety Critical Linux Working Group for functional safety, and that work culminated in the SIL2LinuxMP project, which laid groundwork for using GNU/Linux in safety-related systems. SIL2 refers to Safety Integrity Level 2 under IEC 61508, the tier relevant to a broad range of industrial and automation applications.
That earlier project fed directly into wider Linux Foundation efforts around safety certification, and Jan Altenberg’s conversation with Jonathan touches on where OSADL is looking now: continuing to build the case, and the technical underpinnings, for Linux in environments where a software failure has real-world consequences. The goal is not academic. Automation, robotics, and industrial control are all areas where proprietary real-time operating systems have dominated precisely because of certification requirements, and OSADL is working to close that gap for open source.
The broader theme running through the episode is cooperation: between OSADL members, between the cooperative and the wider Linux kernel community, and between open-source developers and the industry partners who need their software to meet standards that open-source projects have not always prioritised. As Altenberg and the podcast make clear, the OSADL model treats open source and industry as genuinely compatible, not as communities that merely tolerate one another.
Episode 882 is available as a DRM-free MP3 download and with a full transcript for those who prefer to read. For anyone building on Linux in industrial contexts, or simply curious how the real-time kernel work finally landed, it is a well-grounded hour on what OSADL has done and what it is planning next. The governing board details for the Real Time Linux project are listed at realtime-linux.org.
