> Personally, I think this should be done it the kernel somehow and
> apply it to any/all shared I/O devices. A large 'tar x' should not
> kill disk I/O for everyone. Ftp shouldn't kill the Ethernet for all
> users of the network. A program that is dumping stuff to the X server
> shouldn't kill X performance for all the other programs.
Linux covers the tar above quite well, but I guess from your tone that
you have IDE disks. The X problem isn't related to the kernel, but
a feature of the single threaded X server, but as just about all video
cards only permit a single command queue it is still very difficult to
keeps things moving when one client is dumping data to the screen.
All nice ideas, but sometimes it is the hardware that lets you down.
Jon.
-- Jon. <jon@gte.esi.us.es, http://www.esi.us.es/~jon>