Massalin's Synthesis was a research OS designed for low-latency media processing. It's been decades since I read the thesis, so don't trust me to summarize it,

Massalin's Synthesis was a research OS designed for low-latency media processing. It's been decades since I read the thesis, so don't trust me to summarize it, but I think it was something like: set up layers in kernel space, but collapse them with runtime code generation (fusing loops), keep switching overhead low instead of buffering a lot, and schedule with a phase-locked loop in software. http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ch1.html http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ch1.html