On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 10:21:35 EDT, Timothy Miller said:

> > I'm guessing that the anticipatory scheduler is the culprit here.  Soon as 
I figure
> > out the incantations to use the deadline scheduler, I'll report back....

> It would be unfortunate if AS and the interactivity scheduler were to 
> conflict.  Is there a way we can have them talk to each other and have 
> AS boost some I/O requests for tasks which are marked as interactive?

Well.,.. it turns out I was half right, sort of.  My remaining glitches *were*
I/O related rather than the CPU scheduler.  However, they weren't directly
related to the /sys/block/hda/queue/iosched/* values.

Turns out that at least on this laptop, 256M is just a bit tight on memory under
some conditions (well... OK... having X and xmms running, and then doing a
'tar xjvf linux-2.6.0-test1.tar.bz2' and launching OpenOffice 1.1rc1 all at once
is probably a stress test and a half ;).

Watching /proc/vmstat, it became obvious that audio skips were happening *only*
when 'pswpout' was going up - which means somebody's waiting on a page *IN*
that won't happen till another page goes *out* to swap first.....

Time for more pondering.. ;)