Lessons Learned Moving from Pharlap to Linux RT

The start of the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment (AWAKE) facility at CERN in 2016 came with the need for a continuous image acquisition system. The international scientific collaboration responsible for this project requested low and high resolution acquisition at a capture rate of 10Hz and 1 Hz respectively. To match these requirements, GigE digital cameras were connected to a PXI system running PharLap, a real-time operating system, using dual port 1GB/s network cards. With new requirements for a faster acquisition with higher resolution, it was decided to add 10GB/s network cards and a Network Attached Storage (NAS) directly connected to the PXI system to avoid saturating the network. There was also a request to acquire high-resolution images on several cameras during a limited duration, typically 30 seconds, in a burst acquisition mode. To comply with these new requirements PharLap had to be abandoned and replaced with Linux RT. This paper describes the limitation of the PharLap system and the lessons learned during the transition to Linux RT. We will show the improvement of CPU stability and data throughput reached.