I recently stumbled upon an LWN article that mentioned Con Kolivas is
working on a new kernel scheduler for Desktop/Multimedia/Gaming PCs
called "BFS":
http://lwn.net/Articles/350100
Well, I've tried it. I wrote my experiences with it here:
http://lwn.net/Articles/350820
If you're feeling adventurous, you might want to give that one a try. In
my case, it helped immensely, especially with sound latency and skips
and other artifacts during real-time playback (I was not using an RT
kernel before that though). Note that BFS has been updated to 0.206
since I wrote that.
The patch to kernel 2.6.30 and docs can be found at:
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs
