Con Kolivas has released a new high-performance patchset [story] for the 2.4.19 stable kernel.

Con Kolivas has been maintaining an excellent set of kernel patches " designed to improve system responsiveness, with emphasis on desktop pcs." The latest patches are against the stable 2.4.19 kernel, adding the O(1) scheduler, batch scheduling, kernel preemption, low latency and Andrea Arcangeli's latest -aa VM improvements. You can optionally swap the -aa VM for Rik van Riel's [earlier interview] -rmap VM, as included in Alan Cox's [earlier interview] 2.4 -ac branch.