On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 01:09:28PM +0100, Martijn Sipkema wrote: Any use of an explicit or implied blocking mutex across threads with differing priorities can results in priority inversion problems. The real problem, however, is contention. If you get rid of the contention in a certain critical section, you then also get rid of latency in the system. They are one and the same problem. It's to decouple the system from various time related problems with jitter. It's critical to use this since the nature of Linus is so temporally coarse that these techniques must be used to "smooth" over latency problems in the Linux kernel. I personally would love to see these audio applications run on a first-class basis under Linux. Unfortunately, that won't happen until it gets near real time support prevasively through the kernel just like in SGI's IRIX. Multimedia applications really need to be under a hard real time system with special scheduler support so that CPU resources, IO channels can be throttled.