choice prompt "Preemption Mode" default PREEMPT_RT config PREEMPT_NONE bool "No Forced Preemption (Server)" help This is the traditional Linux preemption model geared towards throughput. It will still provide good latencies most of the time but there are no guarantees and occasional long delays are possible. Select this option if you are building a kernel for a server or scientific/computation system, or if you want to maximize the raw processing power of the kernel, irrespective of scheduling latencies. config PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY bool "Voluntary Kernel Preemption (Desktop)" help This option reduces the latency of the kernel by adding more "explicit preemption points" to the kernel code. These new preemption points have been selected to minimize the maximum latency of rescheduling, providing faster application reactions, at the cost of slightly lower throughput. This allows reaction to interactive events by allowing a low priority process to voluntarily preempt itself even if it is in kernel mode executing a system call. This allows applications to run more 'smoothly' even when the system is under load. Select this if you are building a kernel for a desktop system. config PREEMPT_DESKTOP bool "Preemptible Kernel (Low-Latency Desktop)" help This option reduces the latency of the kernel by making all kernel code that is not executing in a critical section preemptible. This allows reaction to interactive events by permitting a low priority process to be preempted involuntarily even if it is in kernel mode executing a system call and would otherwise not about to reach a preemption point. This allows applications to run more 'smoothly' even when the system is under load, at the cost of slighly lower throughput and a slight runtime overhead to kernel code. (According to profiles, when this mode is selected then even during kernel-intense workloads the system is in an immediately preemptible state more than 50% of the time.) Select this if you are building a kernel for a desktop or embedded system with latency requirements in the milliseconds range. config PREEMPT_RT bool "Complete Preemption (Real-Time)" select PREEMPT_SOFTIRQS select PREEMPT_HARDIRQS select PREEMPT_RCU select RT_MUTEXES help This option further reduces the scheduling latency of the kernel by replacing almost every spinlock used by the kernel with preemptible mutexes and thus making all but the most critical kernel code involuntarily preemptible. The remaining handful of lowlevel non-preemptible codepaths are short and have a deterministic latency of a couple of tens of microseconds (depending on the hardware). This also allows applications to run more 'smoothly' even when the system is under load, at the cost of lower throughput and runtime overhead to kernel code. (According to profiles, when this mode is selected then even during kernel-intense workloads the system is in an immediately preemptible state more than 95% of the time.) Select this if you are building a kernel for a desktop, embedded or real-time system with guaranteed latency requirements of 100 usecs or lower. endchoice config PREEMPT bool default y depends on PREEMPT_DESKTOP || PREEMPT_RT config PREEMPT_SOFTIRQS bool "Thread Softirqs" default n # depends on PREEMPT help This option reduces the latency of the kernel by 'threading' soft interrupts. This means that all softirqs will execute in softirqd's context. While this helps latency, it can also reduce performance. The threading of softirqs can also be controlled via /proc/sys/kernel/softirq_preemption runtime flag and the sofirq-preempt=0/1 boot-time option. Say N if you are unsure. config PREEMPT_HARDIRQS bool "Thread Hardirqs" default n depends on GENERIC_HARDIRQS_NO__DO_IRQ select PREEMPT_SOFTIRQS help This option reduces the latency of the kernel by 'threading' hardirqs. This means that all (or selected) hardirqs will run in their own kernel thread context. While this helps latency, this feature can also reduce performance. The threading of hardirqs can also be controlled via the /proc/sys/kernel/hardirq_preemption runtime flag and the hardirq-preempt=0/1 boot-time option. Per-irq threading can be enabled/disable via the /proc/irq///threaded runtime flags. Say N if you are unsure.