Does the PREEMPT_RT patchset matter wrt. audio latencies in Linux? That seems to be the biggest effort wrt. "low latency" workloads at least on the kernel side.
Even with PREEMPT_RT, I can't even run 2ms pipelines without xruns.
I don't think this is within the realm of fixable. Linux simply isn't a good design for this. Kernel too large and unpredictable. Who knows when or if execution will return to userspace.
Ftr, on Pipewire on a Dell xps with iRig2, I'm getting 4.6ms reported with just PREEMPT. An xrun every few minutes if I try to go to ~2ms. I suspect I could get that working reliably with RT.
So, 5ms is less than two metres. When COVID-19 forced you to stand a little further away from people, did you find it added "an eternity" of latency to everything? No? You barely noticed? Right.
One exercise that's interesting is you can build a physical loop (e.g. speaker plus microphone) and play with how long it takes samples to leave your software, turn into audio, then re-enter and come back to your software. You might find that to your disappointment a software stack may be giving you just 256 samples of latency but your hardware adds say 8 milliseconds on top of that.
This approach also helps you ensure you're doing apples to apples comparisons.
In no way is it acceptable for Linux to add 5ms to the chain.