sync, pdflush and interrupts

Hello,

Forgive my ignorance, I'm a kernel newbie.

I'm running 2.6.9 on powerpc (8240) and it works well except that I have
a device (codec) generating a lot of interrupts and have problems when
pdflush wakes-up or sync() is called (dropped packets, so on so forth...).

I'm aware of real-time patches for linux. Most of what I've seen so far
seems to be i386-centric. Is this viable for my type of problem, if so,
what's the status of any ppc 'patches'.

I'd appreciate any pointers to useful information.