I just did some more testing with 2.4.10-ac10, 2.4.10-ac10-eatcache, and
2.4.11. Fast sequential i/o on any of these kernels makes the system
stop doing anything else.
On 2.4.10-ac10 and 2.4.10-ac10-eatcache, the performance is the same. I
start a mmap i/o process that reads and writes 16MB blocks in a 1GB file.
This proceeds at about 20MB/s while nothing else is running. XMMS is
undisturbed by this activity. Then, I start dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile
bs=32k count=32768. This proceeds at 40MB/s but XMMS stops completely and
the mmap i/o rate at the same time fals to about 100KB/s. Essentially no
other process makes progress while the dd is running. The system is
unusable.
On 2.4.11, XMMS skips[1] but the mmap i/o continues to make progress at
about 5MB/s. The dd proceeds as well, slightly slower than under
2.4.10-ac10[-eatcache]. Interactive behavior is abyssmal.
The machine is 1.4GHz Athlon, 256MB main memory, software RAID-1 on
aic7xxx.
No, I haven't tried preemptible kernel yet.
-jwb
[1] Skipping is a gentle term. XMMS plays 10ms bursts every 5-10 seconds.