Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yeah. There are lots of OSes that assume disk access is fast enough you 
> can block while it goes on. (Indeed, I think I saw in the release notes 
> that they just fixed this in the latest Linux kernel, letting you now 
> kill a process waiting on disk access, but it's been like that in UNIX 
> since before V7.)

  Linux indeed had this problem too: If there was an error reading a DVD,
the system would become *extremely* sluggish for something like 5 minutes
(and the program which attempted the read completely unresponsive for that
time). There was a trick to reduce this time, and it was to reduce the
read ahead amount for the DVD drive using /sbin/hdparm -a.

  But as you say, maybe they have fixed that lately because it hasn't been
happening lately, even with erroneus DVDs.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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