Compare hard and soft real-time scheduling.

Hard real-time systems have absolute deadlines - missing causes system failure (pacemaker, anti-lock brakes). Use deterministic scheduling: Rate Monotonic (static priority by period), Earliest Deadline First (dynamic). Require worst-case analysis. Soft real-time has deadlines but degraded performance is acceptable (video streaming, games). Use priority scheduling with bounded latency. RTOS kernels minimize interrupt latency, avoid priority inversion, provide deterministic behavior. Linux RT-PREEMPT patch adds soft real-time.