i've just been reading all about kernel stuff, as i've built a gentoo system, and i'm now patching the (2.4.20) kernel up for the best audio performance i can get. i'm sticking with 2.4.20 so that i have something nice and stable. anyway, i discovered that the 2.5 series of kernels already include the preemption patch. robert love, the maintainer of the preemption stuff also has another patch up on his website called the lock break patch. it is an addition to the preemption patch which works much like andrew mortons patch, and is partly based on it. i don't think it exists for the 2.5 series, but i think that i am going to use it instead of the ll patch for my kernel, as it seems like it might work better in conjunction with the preemption patch. as for the nvidia drivers, i am using those too. i have no idea whether there could be code in them that could not be preempted, but if you found problems with them, you could always use the "nv" module instead of the "nvidia" module. it's support for the nvidia cards is much more basic (but looked the same as the "nvidia" module when i ran X), so maybe it might work better with audio stuff. just a thought. ian On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Maarten de Boer wrote: