simonask
an hour ago
As a musician, glad to see audio production mentioned as an important use case.
Even a 10 ms delay is noticeable when playing an instrument. A lot of processing is required to produce a sound: Receive the input over a hardware interface, send it into userspace, determine what sound to play - usually a very complicated calculation with advanced plugins - potentially accessing many megabytes of raw sound data, apply chains of effects, mix it all together, send megabytes of uncompressed sound data back to the kernel, and push it out through an audio interface.
The more predictable the kernel can be, the more advanced audio processing can be, and better music comes out. Every single microsecond counts.
Modern software instruments can emulate acoustic instruments with a high degree of precision and realism, and a huge range of expressive freedom, but that takes a lot of processing power in real time.
guenthert
10 minutes ago
I Dunno. "The main aim of the PREEMPT_RT patch is to minimize the amount of kernel code that is non-preemptible", that's nice and all, but there are still no guarantees, which (in some interpretation of "real time") a RTOS is all about. For some applications the effort might suffice, but others will insist on those guarantees. For music recordings, I (perhaps naively) would expect a decent audio card with its own processor and (RT) firmware would yield better results.