[LAU] reducing xruns (System configuration)

[David Kastrup]

david <gnome at hawaii.rr.com> writes:

> On my laptop, with Debian's 4.8.0-1-amd64 (non-RT kernel), I can run
> all day with the same USB card at 10.7msec latency, without a single
> xrun. No network or video slowdown.
>
> 4.8 doesn't have the Spectre/Meltdown patches. 4.16 does. So I blame
> the Spectre/Meltdown patches.

IIRC, the most likely culprit (page table isolation, making for quite
more expensive context switches) can be disabled on the kernel command
line at boot.  This would be

pti=off

Of course, not to be used on a system providing non-privileged accounts
to third parties.  But for an audio workstation, this might be
reasonable.

-- 
David Kastrup