[LAU] RT kernel

[Len Ovens]

On Fri, 4 Nov 2016, Yassin Philip wrote:

> Wow... And I'm not even sure that it's worth :/ I guess I'll stick to my 
> "sudo apt install linux-lowlatency" nobrainer. One has to admit it's easier, 
> it even puts itself as default in grub, and stays up-to-date :| By the way,

Glad you like it. The grub hack (really hack is the only word) is mine 
assuming you use Studio. Changing the grub hack to work with RT kernels 
would be quite easy.

> does the rtirq-init IRQ balancing script work with this kind of kernel? It

Yes rtirq works with low latency. As the work on RT went on most of the RT 
patches have become mainline. The low latency includes all the RT stuff in 
mainline kernel. There are some people who do actually need RT so I will 
not suggest "nobody needs RT for Audio" as RT does seem to help with some 
kinds of difficult hardware and/or high cpu load uses. Even with RT there 
is more than one kind. Kernels are one of the most distro agnostic bits of 
code around. Dropping an RT kernel for some place else is likely to 
work... and if not grub gives the choice of booting from something else so 
you can remove it :)

> Does anybody here use lowlatency kernels, and do they come with special usage 
> tips and recommendations? Thanks a lot anyway, Ralf;

The use of low latecny kernels in audio is quite common. Taking care of 
everything else first (own irq, good USB port for USB cards, PCI audio in 
the first place, etc) can allow the use of 1 or 2 ms latency with no 
xruns. As CPU use increases with the use of more synths towards max DSP it 
may be possible to get just a bit more cpu use with RT.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net