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The State of Linux IO Scheduling For the Desktop?

Posted by timothy on from the in-and-out-and-in-and-out dept.

pinkeen writes "I've used Linux as my work & play OS for 5+ years. The one thing that constantly drives me mad is its IO scheduling. When I'm copying a large amount of data in the background, everything else slows down to a crawl while the CPU utilization stays at 1-2%. The process which does the actual copying is highly prioritized in terms of I/O. This is completely unacceptable for a desktop OS. I've heard about the efforts of Con Kolivas and his Brainfuck Scheduler, but it's unsupported now and probably incompatible with latest kernels. Is there any way to fix this? How do you deal with this? I have a feeling that if this issue was to be fixed, the whole desktop would become way more snappier, even if you're not doing any heavy IO in the background." Update: 10/23 22:06 GMT by T : As reader ehntoo points out in the discussion below, contrary to the submitter's impression, "Con Kolivas is still actively working on BFS, it's not unsupported. He's even got a patch for 2.6.36, which was only released on the 20th. He's also got a patchset out that I use on all my desktops which includes a bunch of tweaks for desktop use." Thanks to ehntoo, and hat tip to Bill Huey.

5 of 472 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Perhaps you should.. by biryokumaru · · Score: 0, Troll

    Actually, I much prefer Slashdot's HTML style comment system. Maybe you should just not be lazy.

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  2. Is Desktop Linux [still] relevant? by bogaboga · · Score: 0, Troll

    I ask this question with utmost sincerity. Folks Over here believe it is indeed dead. I am afraid I agree with them. I hear so little about desktop Linux these days. It's all about iOS, Android and RIM. The future does not appear to be on track to change anytime soon. Now tell me I am wrong and why.

  3. Re:easy solution: by 0123456 · · Score: 1, Troll

    You mean an OS like Windows which will swap out the web browser you're using when you copy a big file from one disk to another even though it's far too large for the entire file to fit in the disk cache?

  4. Re:have you tried ionice? by Spaham · · Score: 0, Troll

    what do you mean exactly ???
    I have 4.5 Tb inside my macpro and some more externally, and more on my LAN...
    how can this be scored 2 ???

  5. Re:Perhaps you should.. by cynyr · · Score: 0, Troll

    Because using gvim and then pasting that is faster/easier than trying to format a long post in the stupid textarea on most forums.

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