Andrew Morton And The Low-Latency Kernel Patch

An Anonymous Coward writes: "KernelTrap has interviewed Linux kernel hacker Andrew Morton, author of the low-latency patch. Though his patch has received less attention than Robert Love's preemptible kernel patch (recently merged into the 2.5 kernel), it results in quite significantly lower latencies. The interview is quite interesting, delving into the low-latency patch, explaining how it works and the differences between it and the preempt patch. He also talks about his ext3 work, porting that journaling filesystem from the older stable 2.2 kernel to the current stable 2.4 kernel."

Comments

Re:realtime?

[Error27]

The difference is that hard real time doesn't mean low latency it just means that there is a _guaranteed_ maximum latency.

Soft real time means that you can almost gaurantee the latency. Generally, of course, you want these latencies to be pretty small. Soft real time is for when you use check the "use real time where available" option on xmms and run it under sudo.

I hear that Linux (probably with patches) is a little better than windows and a little worse than os X for latency.