I have a very uneducated question about the relationship between
Linux and "slow hardware". I'm defining slow hardware to be devices such
as older non-DMAable IDE hard drives. I have an extra such beast
collecting dust in my hallway and I want to know if throwing it in my
Linux system (2.1.51, x86 w/Busmaster EIDE drive) will hurt overall
performance. If I put it in as /tmp, for example, could a regular user
tie up CPU time on the whole system by pegging that device with sustained
IO? Is there a way to put a resource limit on the device so that IO to my
primary disk takes precedence over IO to the secondary one? I'm hoping
that adding the device won't bring the overall performance of my machine
down to the lowest common denominator.
Thanks for any of your advice and recommendations,
-bp
B. James Phillippe <bryan@Terran.ORG>
UNIX, Linux, networks, programming, etc.
NIC:BJP4 # http://w3.terran.org/~bryan