This option turns the kernel into a real-time kernel by replacing
various locking primitives (spinlocks, rwlocks, etc.) with
preemptible priority-inheritance aware variants, enforcing
interrupt threading and introducing mechanisms to break up long
non-preemptible sections. This makes the kernel, except for very
low level and critical code paths (entry code, scheduler, low
level interrupt handling) fully preemptible and brings most
execution contexts under scheduler control.

Select this if you are building a kernel for systems which
require real-time guarantees.

source code:

kernel/locking/