which realtime kernel - antergos

[wayneward]

im looking at which is going to be the best realtime kernel now having the choice of 3?

im on antergos on gnome running a LTS RT kernel so i dont run into any problems as im going to be using this on live performances maybe 4 / 5 times a week so i get this kernel 4.9.76-rt61-1-rt-lts slightly older but stable.
I have the choice of the standard realtime kernel linux-rt-4.14.15.13-3
or the linux-rt-bfq 4.14.15.13-3 which has a BFQ scheduler patched in as well

im on a high spec laptop with 512 ssd drive with a usb input which takes in one vocal and one guitar
and one midi footboard
i have one signal for vocals to rakarrack
one signal to guitarix
and a midi in for the guitar
and internal midi coming from linux show player to trigger midi signals
and im looking at adding opendmx qlc plus this week to use under a live show enviroment.

which would be the best for performance and why? and would you use LTS for staying out of update problems or is the newer RT with the BFQ the way to go for best live performance ?

thankyou

[Jack Winter]

Just one note, at the moment 4.14-rt is the development branch for rt where new rt code is tested, while older kernels like 4.9-rt are considered stable. I've not often seen bugs with the dev branch, but maybe something to be aware of.

[wayneward]

cheers jack im just wondering what the difference is between
linux-rt-bfq and linux-rt
and will this make better performance for what im doing do you think.

Wayne

[Jack Winter]

bfq is another I/O scheduler, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_scheduling.

Not sure how relevant it is for your use case. IIRC I use deadline myself (which all kernels have). I think with SSDs it's not really an issue.

When using HDDs even with BFQ I had occasional xruns, until I figured out that I need to keep my audio files on a separate HDD to the one that had / and /home. Not that I've used bfq a lot, but in my case it never seemed to help much, ymmv...

[nikgnomicradio]

I don't think you need BFQ - that is more for spinning disk HDDs

For SSD, deadline is best choice, or else noop

Best performance on I/O schedulers and kernels is very dependent on hardware. Newest version is usually better and keeps up with the rolling release
but may not work as well as older version on specific hardware