Re: status of Preemptible Kernel 2.6.7

[Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>]

Marcus Hartig wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> how is now the status of the preemptible feature of the kernel 2.6.7. 
> Should preempt be used for desktop systems (like in the help menu) or 
> should it not really?
> 
> I have made tests with the alsa-latency-test, where it not really 
> reduces the latency of the kernel and gives a little bit lower 
> performance of the whole system.


I vaguely recall someone recently talking about eliminating preempt by 
improving low-latency.  See, if everything were ideal, we wouldn't need 
preempt, because all drivers would yield the CPU at appropriate times. 
Supposedly, preempt introduces some undesirable overhead.

Perhaps we could turn preempt into some kind of watch-dog.  If a kernel 
thread doesn't behave, it gets killed.  :)