Dear all,

I am devloping and maintaining a restricted Linux system that has to meet some soft real-time requirements while at the same time it has to display a reasonably responsive GUI to the user.
This far, I have always seen to that all that has to do with automatic detection of usb devices, automtically invoked database maintenance operations etc have been disabled in order to prevent the system from being disturbed while doing some critical (soft) real-time task. If the user plugs in a usb memory stick, nothing will happen until the user explicitly mounts it through some command.

Now I wonder if this technique and high level of restriction has become outdated.

Could a modern version of the kernel, with some sort of pre-emption enabled, make it possible to enable automatic actions, though with such low priority that the real-time tasks can keep on undisturbed?

Let's say that the system is sending and receiving some signals, and I would want it to do that for two minutes. Is it possible to configure the kernel so that the system won't react on an usb printer, camera or other device plugged in until those two minutes have passed? Sure, this would seem very inresponsive to the user, but during the exectution certain tasks, I think this would be tolerable.

Note that this is not a minimal, embedded system. I try to keep it as much vanilla as I can.

Best regards,
Fredrik