[ksk]

Okay, but I'm not suggesting that spreading DPCs over multiple cores is the only solution. It is a solution in some cases. Originally I was merely responding to your point about not being able to schedule DPCs on other cores. You were speaking more generally from the OS schedulers POV, but I took it more literally.

Honestly.. I've spent countless hours hunting down bad drivers to fix audio stutter and other crap on my gaming PC. I've finally got DPC latency under 10microSec and I'm not touching a thing :)

[aionescu]

Yes, my point was that the OS isn't currently doing it on its own, putting the onus on the driver developers -- which have limited information available to them and are pretty much unable to make the right choice -- unless we're talking about highly customized embedded-type machines, or unless the user is willing to heavily participate in the process.

It was just a simple example of something that could change for the better in terms of performance, but that probably won't because it's a significant amount of code churn with little $$$ benefit.

I was honestly surprised that a core-balancing algorithm was added in Windows 7, but that was done at the last second (RC2) and by a very senior (while young) dev that had a lot of balls and respect. Sadly he was thanked by being promoted into management, as is usual with Microsoft.