Reg Me Please wrote: > What do you mean with the scaring "less than optimal"? :-) > > I'd like to read more about experiences in running OS on laptops. > I'm currently running Linux and feel sick about the un-responsiveness of the > system whie, say, burning a CD or copying large files. > Is OS's scheduler smarter than the Linux's ones? > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > laptop-discuss mailing list > laptop-discuss at opensolaris.org > Very debatable due to legacy reasons and an ever present balancing act as Sun is still a large scale server vendor, but in terms of comparing say OS to Solaris 10, there has been leadway with user perceptual responsiveness. Generally all OS will bottleneck these days due to disk speed rather than CPU. CD/DVD burners generally write at 18x or 22,050kb/s (20mb/s) saturating about 50-75% of the typically available disk I/O and some systems cannot manage to run with the remaining I/O.
The issue with CPU's, especially when talking about Intel Core 2 and newer is a non-issue from my experience and general slowdowns are generally an indicator of other hardware issues or areas which need addressing. Efficiency comes from two sources, hardware advancements adjusted for what is lost due to power management "features" and bus bottlenecks, and software but not necessarily (or hardly ever) scheduler algorithms. ZFS if you have enough memory (2GB) will give you the perceptual responsiveness you are seeking if disk I/O is indeed your issue which I really suspect because with intensive tasks on any OS the CPU is not the first to be saturated. Since this topic is in laptop-discuss I put my money on cheap PATA drives or 5400RPM SATA being your problem, so ZFS' aggressive caching into ram may benefit your workflow. James
