Is there any difference

[Angela]

Is there any difference between Hard and Soft real-time systems? If so what are they? My friend asked me this and I could not figure out.

[cyrus]

Yes certainly there are differences between Hard and Soft real-time systems. To put in brief a hard real-time system guarantees that critical tasks complete on time. A soft real time system where a critical real-time task gets priority over other tasks and retains that priority until it completes. As in hard real time systems kernel delays need to be bounded

[rachelle]

From an architectural point of view, there is a huge difference between soft and hard real-time systems although both systems have to face more and more performance-demanding applications. In soft real-time systems, the aim of the architects is to build a system which offers a guaranteed bandwidth to each real-time task. In hard real-time systems, the architecture must guarantee that, at some points, a task will always be finished.