You would likely be mistaken. Real time kernels (like Redhat's MRG product, or the -rt patchset from Thomas Gleixner) have less jitter aka more predictable timi

You would likely be mistaken. Real time kernels (like Redhat's MRG product, or the -rt patchset from Thomas Gleixner) have less jitter aka more predictable timing. However, in virtually every average case, they have slightly higher latency than the stock linux kernel. The reality of 100G+ networking or low latency networking is the kernel can't keep up with the interrupts from the hardware, so you turn interrupts per packet off (adaptive coalescing / ethtool -C for ethernet), so userspace tcp/ip stacks such as Intel / Linux Foundation's DPDK[1], Solarflare's OpenOnload[2], Mellanox's VMA[3] and Chelsio's Wire Direct[4] exist to fill this need. Heck, even the BBC wrote their own kernel bypass[5] networking layer! Note that Solarflare, Mellanox, and Chelsio are all heavily used in High Performance Computing supercomputers along with finance such as electronic trading. If there was no need, there wouldn't be so many options due to the market wanting them. [1] https://www.dpdk.org/ https://www.dpdk.org/ [2] https://www.openonload.org/ https://www.openonload.org/ [3] http://www.mellanox.com/page/software_vma http://www.mellanox.com/page/software_vma [4] https://www.chelsio.com/nic/wire-direct/ https://www.chelsio.com/nic/wire-direct/ [5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2018-04-high-speed-networking-open-source-kernel-bypass https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2018-04-high-speed-networking-... Source: have worked in electronic trading as a Linux engineer for 11-12ish years.