On 29/08/14 15:40, Len Ovens wrote: Not quite on topic, since this isn't to do with Hyper-threading, but certainly the Linux scheduler has been getting much more sophisticated in dealing with different kinds of cores ... in ARM it now schedules tasks for chips with some smaller cores and some faster ones, keeping them busy with suitable sized tasks. The ARM kernels running the most recent Samsung tablets (with 4 big plus 4 little cores) have this GTS in the 3.14 kernels ... it runs all 8 cores together assigning tasks appropriate to each, rather than just switching between big or little of each pair to save power. Selling hardware on that scale certainly brings a budget, and since the kernel is GPL it can't be kept in-house. Seems that 3.14 has also added a deadline-based scheduler that is closer to what audio needs from realtime than the extremely low latency preemption based on priorities that the two older realtime schedulers offer. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2014/01/deadline -scheduling-314 Simon