James Cornell <sparcdr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
Yes, the OpenSolaris scheduler is definitely better suited for most cases - in
special CD/DVD/BluRay burning.
> 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.
DVD burners for laptops use the same chipsets as "big ones" but run at most
at half spindle speed. 8x (may be 10x) seems to be the max DVD write speed
for laptop drives. This is less than 12850 kB/s.
If you have a hals way recent HDD in the laptop this is no problem.
Note that if both HDD and CD/DVD writer are on PATA, you share the chip
transfer speed.
If you connect a writer via USB, first check whether your USB controller and
the USB <-> (s)ATA adaptor have no problems with sustained speed.
> 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.
Cdrecord did never use more than 5% of the total CPU performance even for older
systems. Exception: PATA using PIO. For this reason ignore hints from people in
the net and always connect PATA CD/DVD writers via a 80 wire cable.
Make sure that you never try to write a CD or DVD from a image file that lives
in
/tmp (tmpfs) as the Solaris pager daemon has a serious performance problem when
there is a need to page in data.
J?rg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
