Primarily for soft (or hard) real time operations. Even kernel modules running in a RT-Linux have a difficult time responding consistently to an IRQ at sub-10 uS latency. Of course, the larger SoC capable of running Linux can have hardware latencies due to shared data buses, etc. but still having a RTOS layer “underneath” Linux would be a good way to ensure more consistent responses.
Does that mean you could run l4linux with sel4? Didn’t realize the l4 api is consistent/broad enough to do that. That’s cool! The linked “drops” rtos seemed to be dead a long time back.