Implementing Periodic Tasks in Linux

When learning real-time programming, one of the major difficulties is to face low-level details related to both the computing platform and the operating system, which require considerable programming effort, even for implementing a simple periodic task. This is because most operating systems do not provide any support for programming periodic tasks and managing deadlines. For example, the POSIX real-time standard only provides a low-level notion of thread; thus programmers need to develop additional code on top of the POSIX API to expose a higher-level interface easier to understand and manage.