Thanks for the great suggestions, everyone, and resources. There's a lot of things I need to check out, now. irq/pci settings (lspci & cat /proc/interrupts), the 2.6 kernels, Ingo Molnar's patch, disable hyper-threading if possible,... I think I'll have to take a closer look at source code to understand Claude's multi-threaded idea.
Use Linux from Scratch if you are bored and have too much time on your hands.
Thanks for that Frank...I just might be bored enough. I maybe have learned enough to try to design a system. I haven't abandoned the idea just yet. I think I'll try the other ideas listed first, before trying LFS after all....
Thanks for everyone's suggestions, Chuck