You can make some tradeoffs with kernel options. Which one you choose is up to you (assuming it's your personal machine). In "make menuconfig" go to...
General setup --> Preemption Model ---> You have 3 choices. The 1st choice will probably finish your rendering fastest, but other programs will have problems breaking in for a timeslice. This will look like freezing. The 3rd choice will give the most possibility for other programs to preempt, but will run slightly slower overall. The 2nd choice is a compromise. Assuming you're the admin of the machine, the choice is up to you. Sorry, "you can't have your cake and eat it too". 1) "No Forced Preemption (Server)"; manual version "CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE" > 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 longer 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. 2) "Voluntary Kernel Preemption (Desktop)"; "CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY" > 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 reduce 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. 3) "Preemptible Kernel (Low-Latency Desktop)"; "CONFIG_PREEMPT" > 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 be about to reach > a natural preemption point. This allows applications to run more > 'smoothly' even when the system is under load, at the cost of slightly > lower throughput and a slight runtime overhead to kernel code. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications