2016 April

Debian – getting a lowlatency kernel.

For audio work a lowlatency kernel or an rt-patched kernel should be used. Lowlatency is enough in most cases. Personally I’ve found that only an rt-patched kernel was capable of avoiding x-runs.

In Debian you can get an rt-patched kernel directly from the main repository. To install a lowlatency kernel, though, you need to compile one yourself, but that is quite easy. In the steps below change the version number to match the version number you want to use.

apt-get install build-essential fakeroot
apt-get build-dep linux
apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev
apt-get install linux-source-4.2
tar -xaf /usr/src/linux-source-4.2.tar.xz
cd linux-source-4.2
cp /boot/config-4.2.0-1-amd64 .config
make menuconfig

In the gui:
enable preempt
enable timers 1000Hz

make -j4 deb-pkg LOCALVERSION=-lowlatency KDEB_PKGVERSION=$(make kernelversion)-1
cd ..
dpkg -i linux-headers-4.2.5-lowlatency_4.2.5-1_amd64.deb 
dpkg -i linux-image-4.2.5-lowlatency_4.2.5-1_amd64.deb