[ubuntu-studio-devel] Newbie at UbuntuStudio devel

[Kaj Ailomaa]

Just a note about the kernel.

Different kernel versions may perform differently, so that is always a
possibility. Different versions of -lowlatency may perform differently,
that is.

Different hardware may give you different performance, the motherboard,
and the CPU makes a difference. USB, vs PCI, vs Firewire also makes a
difference.

The running services and applications on your desktop system can also
affect performance. One common issue has been wifi, where wifi drivers
can mess things up for you.

A kernel with a realtime patch may outperform linux-lowlatency, but then
again it may not. Depends on how well you have -lowlatency working (some
can get really low latencies).

So, there are a lot of variables, but in my experience, the most
important is usually the kernel, and linux-lowlatency has worked well
for me.

There are really only two kernel choices for audio. linux-lowlatency or
a realtime patched kernel, usually called linux-rt (not available in
Ubuntu repos).
With linux-lowlatency you have the great upside of getting regular
security updates and full compability with everything on Ubuntu. It is
identical with the generic kernel that Canonical maintains, only
linux-lowlatency has better performance for low latency operation.
With linux-rt you generally need to know how to build it yourself, or
use a third party archive.