I am looking to do some C programming in 12.10 and require a real time kernel for what I need to do.
Ideally, I'm looking to be able to run this in VirtualBox, with guest additions installed. Can anyone advise me on how to achieve this?
What's the best option available in terms of RT kernels ?
First consider the linux-lowlatency kernel. It's easily available (just install that package and boot to it) and recieves updates. It's built around the generic kernel with configuration tuned to lower latency. This is a soft-real-time kernel.
Given things are going through abstration layers for virtualisation, it's unlikely that the whole stack will be realtime anyway so personally I'd say soft-rt is fine.
If you want to pursue a true realtime system, you're going to have to build your own kernel. All the PPAs appear to have dried up. It's not hard - it's just slightly painful.
Patches aren't available for every version of the kernel but you'll find them here:
I'd also suggest building from the vanilla source instead of hacking a patch onto the end of the standard Ubuntu kernel. If I were doing this, I'd be following this guide:
