Author: Sinan Karasu
Originally developed at: Boeing
Date: Early 1990s
Timer14 is a Solaris kernel module providing sub-10ms high-resolution timers for real-time applications. Originally designed for Boeing’s 777 simulation systems, it enabled precise 25ms execution frames — a critical requirement unmet by Solaris’s default 10ms system clock of the era.
- Direct use of interrupt 14 to establish kernel-level timing
- SPARC assembly integration for register-level timing control
- Provided core infrastructure for aerospace simulation systems
- Later referenced in Sun internal research and academic RTOS development
Timer14 was acknowledged in:
- Marc Hamilton’s 1995 Sun Microsystems technical report:
“This work would have never been possible if not for the original timer14 device driver written by Sinan Karasu of Boeing.”
- RTCOS research by University of Maryland (1996)
- Deployed in Boeing, TRW, and Northrop Grumman labs
src/– Kernel module source (.c,.h, SPARC.s, Makefile)install/– User-space installer utility (for legacy Solaris environments)
Released into the public domain or equivalent.
No warranty expressed or implied.
Preserved here for historical and educational purposes.
Special thanks to Linda Knapp (Sun Microsystems, DSEM Seattle)
for bridging Sun and Boeing teams during this work’s development.
This is a preserved piece of UNIX history.
If you ever used Solaris in real-time contexts, this is part of your lineage.