I think they just got fed up making Linux work in a realtime enviroment. The guys did a great job with the empeg, but it's not as if Linux was ever designed to run something like the empeg/Karma. It is a miracle they managed as good a jobs as they did with empeg/Linux.

With the Karma they are using ecos, which was designed from the start to be a realtime OS.
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Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday