[taneq]

Thanks! Even this still defines noise only in terms of 'interference', and then takes a bit of digging to infer that it's something to do with timing and interrupts, and so it's probably jitter in execution time rather than referring to RF interference or electrical noise. I'm no kernel hacker but I've spent a lot of time close to the hardware and I've never heard jitter referred to as 'noise'.

[javier_e06]

I agree indeed. In statistical analysis or signal processing noise is described as an element presenting data/energy other than energy/data to be observed. I guess any data collecting system can call noise anything that is filtered out from that being measured.