In article <C4rxH9.K2D@crdnns.crd.ge.com> davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
quoted text
>  That said, I would love to see update go away because it glitches the
>system performance so badly that it feels like Xenix/286 "hitting the
>wall" once a minute. It's highly desirable to have the kernel chucking
>dirty sectors out to the drive in the dispatcher loop rather than have a
>sync call taking place on a regular basis.

Agreed.  System V R3 has a kernel "subprocess" called bdflush which gets
scheduled like any other process and spends its time doing buffer cache
flushing on an age-and-need(LRU) basis.  I believe SVR4 still does this
(Solaris 2 does, but it's SVR4.0.  Anyone here know if "Destiny" or Unixware
still do it this way?

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery                                       bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org

It's not too late to turn back from the "Gates" of Hell...
Linux: the FREE 32-bit operating system, available NOW. Why waaaaaait for NT?