Re: Streaming disk I/O kills file buffering and makes Linux unusable

[Alan Cox]

> I'm afraid, if we want that Linux will be a good multimedia OS, this is a
> _STRONGLY_NEEDED_  feature.
> 
> The user wants to playback his video/audio from disk, and still be able
> to launch his apps, without waiting 10 secs for loading a simple xterm.
> 
> The SCT's  raw-io patches are nice, but not very suitable in a general purpose
> multimedia enviroment, since you can't tell to the user to store his videos on a
> raw partition.

Stephens patches are basis of raw I/O on files in a filesystem too.

However what you are saying and raw-io don't neccessarily tally. You are
actually saying "there is a bug in the current page cache handling for
this kind of operation". Far better therefore to fix the heuristic used.