My end user testing of 2.4.8-ish kernels

[J Sloan <jjs@pobox.com>]

I did some testing today on the mini-low-latency patch.

I must admit that I was totally biased towards it from the start.

While it certainly didn't hurt anything, the bottom line is that
after hours of mp3/dbench tests, I was unable to quantify any real
difference between 2.4.18-pre3 vanilla and with mini low latency.
They exhibit pretty much the same behaviour in terms of how much
dbench it takes to start hearing audio dropouts in xmms - they were
both smooth up to dbench 40, but started exhibiting sporadic audio
dropouts at dbench 64.

Out of curiosity I booted up 2.4.18pre2-aa2 and found it a real gem.
To my pleasant suprise I was able to run dbench 128 without hearing
a _single_ audio dropout. (the dbench 128 result was 19.75 MB/sec)

With dbench 192 I did start to hear some occasional dropouts, but
they were generally short, e.g. 100ms or so.

In any event, all the 2.4.18-pre-ish kernels I tested today are much
better at this than e.g. 2.4.7 - at least on my hardware, I am now
getting excellent interactive performance under load without preempt
or low-latency patches, and that's a good thing.

IMHO the -aa kernel seems to the clear winner here -

Good for server use, good for desktop use...

Regards

jjs