Comment by cwillu
That's a bit of a red-herring though, as the audio system will only preempt other processes if it's configured for very small buffers and given real-time permissions. A server's audio subsystem won't preempt actual work because a server won't _have_ an audio subsystem running, let alone be configured for sub-millisecond latency.
The real trade-off is the overhead required to make all kernel operations potentially safe WRT maximum wait times.
This is a qualified example. Yes, if you're not doing audio, audio is not going to interrupt. But that's a moot point...