You don't have to do those things, it's just easiest to sometimes. It depends entirely on your hardware and your realtime requirements. If you do in-code synchr

You don't have to do those things, it's just easiest to sometimes. It depends entirely on your hardware and your realtime requirements. If you do in-code synchronization you'll usually have problems with throttling but if you can synchronize against a stable timer/counter you will have fewer issues. It's also worth noting that some of these tasks people throw out are just not a very good fit for even a real time kernel. The main use on Linux seems to be sound and video, which uses specialized hardware. The specialized hardware for other operations is typically not available on Linux capable SoCs and it's worth communicating with a different chip to do those things. The premise of some of these tradeoffs is not always valid.