Hard Real-time Linux

Is it possible?

In the past, I've been told, "No.".

I've just read an article which states "With a little extra work, you can get hard real-time support with the PREEMPT_RT patch."

Dear Lazyweb, is this so?

Building a MMO backend.

I've just read a interesting article at IBM developerWorks discussing MMO backend architecture.

Using this kind of architecture, any modern game engine which provides the typical MOG game tools (such as Unity) can be used as a MMO platform, as long as the web glue between MOG instances is seamless. I've done this, using Python/Pylons, and it works well.

If Unity Technologies is to compete effectively for MMO developer attention, they need to provide a headless server which can run on Linux. Once this last piece is in place, it will become a viable option for MMO type projects.

How does struct.calcsize work?

>>> import struct
>>> struct.calcsize("b") + struct.calcsize("ffi") == struct.calcsize("bffi")
False

I would have expected calcsize("bffi") to be 13, instead it is 16. Hmmm.

Because of this, I have to write some weird code.

>>> a, = struct.unpack("b", buf[0])
>>> b, c, d = struct.unpack("ffi", buf[1:])

Why would this be so...