Citizen Linus

I'm excited for the responsiveness patches. For desktop Linux, it does strike me as odd that mp3s playing in Rhythmbox should skip when certain other things go on (like writing to a flash disk).

I like running vanilla kernels, but there are certainly lots of patchsets out there which tweak CPU schedulers, IO schedulers, swappiness, etc in the name of responsiveness. See:

http://pf-kernel.org.ua/
http://zen-kernel.org/
http://users.on.net/~ckolivas/kernel/

Hopefully these patches get into 2.6.36. It seems like Linus and Ingo at least are willing to address it right now. Hell, Linus even said that "our X behavior under load is pitiful."

Cheers