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

[Mario Becroft <mb@tos.pl.net>]

Ok, I found out how to avoid the problem.

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.

I did notice, however, that running more than one copy of POV-Ray in the
background does slow the computer more and more. After having 4 copies of
POV-Ray running at once I did start to notice the slowness, but even then
it was no too bad. Still not nearly as bad as it was before I added
"SLICES=1."

So, now on my 32MHz TT I do after all have nice smooth multitasking.

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?

-- 
Mario Becroft                        Auckland, New Zealand
mb@tos.pl.net                 http://www.pl.net/user/mario      |\__/,|   (`\
Tariland, Atari Support in New Zealand                        _.|o o  |_   ) )
tariland@tos.pl.net  http://www.pl.net/user/mario/tariland --(((---(((--------