Well, in the course of hunting down the causes of my latency woes I've
found that when I use the 2.5 kernel with alsa compiled into the kernel
directly and wth the pre-emptive option it makes a huge, huge difference,
finally I'm getting actual userspace low lantency, I don't have to run the
audio app as root. With 2.4 I could patch it with the low latency, but
would still need to run the app as root. Without patching for low latency
I was getting ugly clicks and pops even when running the app as root. Even
under Gnome with Redhat 8.0, the xruns have dissapeared using the 2.5.x
kernel.
http://www.brianredfern.com