LinuxMusicians

So I'm learning a bit about kernels and I see that the latest stable release is 3.6.6 according to http://www.kernel.org/
But then I see that 3.2.? is what my Mint 13 with KX studio is running. And aparently there are many modifications for Latency and Real Time and other things that are done to 3.2 mostly. I think I have the realtime kernel but not the low latency. I can record audio pretty well with my firewire interface (latency down to 1.3 with buffer size 64). But I'm having trouble with a USB MIDI controler. I also saw that that there is a problem with the EHCI drivers in kernels before 3.3 and that updating could help. So my Questions are:

Why do people use 3.2 to modify?
Will updating my kernel affect how my system works with KX studio?
Will updating my Kernel possibly help my USB MIDI controler problem?

aprzekaz wrote:And aparently there are many modifications for Latency and Real Time and other things that are done to 3.2 mostly.

The same goes for 3.4 and 3.6, there are real-time patches available for those kernels and they could be tweaked into -lowlatency kernels too.

aprzekaz wrote:I think I have the realtime kernel but not the low latency.

A realtime kernel is also a lowlatency kernel. You can check what kernel you have with uname -a.

aprzekaz wrote:Why do people use 3.2 to modify?

People use any kernel to modify, especially the stable branches. It's just that Ubuntu 12.04 is at 3.2 so it seems there is a lot happening around that specific kernel.

aprzekaz wrote:Will updating my kernel affect how my system works with KX studio?

Yes, that could be possible, it could affect performance in both ways though.

aprzekaz wrote:Will updating my Kernel possibly help my USB MIDI controler problem?

If you're suffering from that EHCI bug thing updating could help: http://forum.linuxmusicians.com/viewtop ... 994#p31879

A more recent kernel could help but anyway, ideally, you want that your USB audio device is the only device in its bus and that this USB bus is the only device in its IRQ. Changing this is not always possible although there might be workarounds. So first check:

lsusb
cat /proc/interrupts

And

lspci | grep -i usb

to see if you are in the case of the infamous Intel Integrated Matching Hub that a newer kernel could solve.