Re: Multitasking during disc access (was: Re: MiNT scheduling)

[Konrad Kokoszkiewicz <draco@mi.com.pl>]

> Adding the "SLICES=1" line to mint.cnf seems to have completely fixed the
> problem.
> 
> Right now I have POV-Ray running in the background and I would not even
> know it's there, everything responds virtually as fast as normal. There is
> a very slight slowness of response in some cases, but this is so tiny that
> it can hardly be observed even when you are looking for it. Even with
> POV-Ray at +20 priority, the slowness is still not very noticable,
> although it is there ever so slightly more than at 0 priority.

That's pretty interesting, cause the difference between SLICES=1 (as you
have set) and SLICES=4 should be hardly noticeable for humans. Afaik,
one slice is 1/200 secs...

> Now if only somehow MiNT could multitask while disc access is occuring. Is
> this possible? If this could be done it would help some things a great
> deal. But is it possible, or is MiNT inherently unable to do so? I hear
> also that in MagiC this feature can be problematic... so it even possible
> to make such a feature work stable?

That depends. I have IDE disks only, so any disk access is blocking. But I
hear that SCSI disk access isn't blocking, MiNT works "smoothly". Of
course, its for Falcon, where SCSI is DMA...

Konrad M.Kokoszkiewicz
mail:draco@mi.com.pl
http://www.orient.uw.edu.pl/~conradus

** Ea natura multitudinis est,
** aut servit humiliter, aut superbe dominatur (Liv. XXIV, 25)
**************************************************************
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