It has been a while since I tried music on Linux so I decided to give it another try.
I installed Debian 10 64-bit with vanilla and PREEMPT_RT version 5.9 kernels from buster-backports on an old Intel Atom D525 single board computer and an IvyBridge i7-3770K machine to experiment with interrupt latencies compared to Win7-64. I also installed the Redhat "tuned-adm" profile package and JRMC 26.
Here are some cyclictest latency result plots that may (or may not) be of interest.
Intel ION D525 PREEMPT_RT kernel, 2 channel 192kHz content playback:
Max latency spikes at 121 microseconds.
![](https://i.ibb.co/cyc6NTM/plot-1-D525.png)
Intel i7-3770K Vanilla 5.9 kernel, 2 channel 192kHz content playback.
Note some fliers out to 506 microseconds not present on the D525 RT:
![](https://i.ibb.co/7bnBX2y/plot-1-3770-K.png)
PREEMPT_RT on i7-3770K running 2 channel 192kHz content playback.
Note max latency spikes are down to 11 microseconds from 506.
![](https://i.ibb.co/CbNVJGf/plot-4-cores-3770-K-RT.png)
PREEMPT_RT on i7-3770K running 6 channels of convolution with 256K taps/channel, steep 384kHz XO's with 192kHz content playback.
Note max latency spikes @ 21 microseconds with heavy convolution load.
![](https://i.ibb.co/tQKy9Sv/plot-4-cores-3770-K-RT-192-6-X-conv.png)
All of these have lower latencies than Win7-64 (in the millisecond range) on the same i7-3770K machine.
Also discovered that the PREEMPT_RT kernel and NVDIA drivers DO NOT MIX.