Use or compile a kernel with BFQ and that kind of stuff takes care of itself without manually having to prioritize I/O. I don't get why BFQ hasn't been mainlined yet, it has the most sane I/O behavior for desktop use and stops all the issues you can have on linux of the desktop slowing to a crawl or music stuttering because you're compressing a 40gb folder or copying files.
Here's a list of precompiled kernels that have been patched with BFQ (and often some more desktop-use tuning):
https://liquorix.net/#install for ubuntu and debian
If you're wary of installing things outside of official repositories or compiling your own kernel, then archlinux is the only distro with a kernel option that has BFQ.
BFQ hasn't been mainlined because it is written for the legacy block layer in the Linux kernel, which will be replaced entirely with the new block multiqueue implementation. It doesn't make much sense to replace CFQ or add a brand new scheduler only to rip it out in a few releases. Linux 4.11 will have support for I/O scheduling for blk-mq. BFQ is currently being ported to blk-mq; that work is the first big hurdle to getting it merged.
> I don't get why BFQ hasn't been mainlined yet, it has the most sane I/O behavior for desktop use
You've answered yourself there: for desktop use. Desktop is a very low priority in the Linux world, as proven by the long history of ignoring desktop-friendly schedulers over and over.
> If you're wary of installing things outside of official repositories or compiling your own kernel, then archlinux is the only distro with a kernel option that has BFQ.
From the page you linked:
> BFQ is the default I/O scheduler in Manjaro, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Sabayon, Arch Linux ARM (for Marvell Kirkwood) and ROSA ...
>> dynamic typing bubble
>Could you explain this? I'm not aware of such a thing at all?
Around 2005 - 2010 there was a massive amount of proselytism on the internet in favour of dynamic languages. The likes of Steve Yegge, DHH, Zed Shaw, Mark Pilgrim, Why the Lucky Stiff, Paul Graham (with lisp) and others were constantly pushing new blog posts, articles, books about the merits of dynamic languages and new teaching material and if you were to read HN or reddit from those years you'd think it was the end of statically typed languages. You couldn't spend a day without seeing things like Ruby on Rails pop up on slashdot and other media.
Fast forward to today :
All the new languages that have gained internet fame in the past years are static. Go, Rust, Typescript, Dart. People still use lots of Java and C#. Meanwhile big companies like Dropbox are abandoning languages like Python. New projects are written in Go despite being the company that employs Guido van Rossum. Nobody talks about Google caring about python anymore either. The dynamic typing "rockstar programmers" have all but disappeared from the internet and stopped blogging/writing articles/writing books, with only one exception, Zed Shaw. The rest have either completely erased their internet presence or just become utterly silent.
There really is a moment on the internet that could be described as the dynamic bubble. Although I'd say, "dynamic echochamber" is more accurate.
Just compare the amount of code execution CVEs found on a yearly basis and the level of severity of each. Then think of how Firefox has much less marketshare than Chrome (FF sits around 8% and its share keeps going down year by year), so Chrome should be a more interesting target for hacking.
Then come back and tell us which browser has the lesser amount, and when some are found, which is most likely to have the more severely exploitable vuln.
During 2016, Firefox had 53 code execution CVE reports.
Chrome had 2.
Firefox only has around 8% of the browser marketshare. Chrome sits between 44% and 60% depending on the source.
So it's not a case of Firefox being more popular and attracting more people to target it for hacks. It's just worse software.
And then there's just user inconveniences like how Firefox becomes extremely slow if you open multiple heavy tabs. e10s has yet to fix it, currently, if you enable it, it only opens 2 processes, one for the UI, and one for the rendering engine. So the UI itself might not slow to a crawl but all your tabs will still feel slow if you open heavy stuff.
Firefox also has a slower rendering engine. My eyesight isn't great and I browse web pages with zoom active in between 120% and 150% depending on pages. That makes Firefox behave extremely slow on some pages. It's particularly unbearable, on, say, slashdot pages with lots of comments.
For the same reason smooth scrolling is the first thing Firefox users disable in Firefox. Smooth scrolling works fine on Chrome. FF has never managed to implement smooth scrolling in a way that doesn't slow things to a crawl and makes the scrolling look like stuttering or low framerate.
People often rely on Javascript benchmarks to say "Hey firefox is as fast as chrome!!!11!!" but JS is only one part of what makes a browser fast or slow. What about the parts that actually render the page to something your screen can display?
> Firefox 57 should be at least equivalent to Chromium.
Chrome would have had to stop all development years ago for that sentence to be true.
And Firefox is less secure and slower because (drumroll, please...) the major architectural changes required to improve on those fronts is completely stymied by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility for addons. Firefox is at last forced to decide between being a bad but very extensible browser or a (hopefully) good but less extensible browser. IMO, the choice is pretty obvious.
But chrome is already a great and less extensible browser, which is the point. If chrome is great and less extensible, and Firefox is good and less extensible, there's little reason to use Firefox unless you just don't like Google.
So true there is way more to the browser than the java script engine. So I ran ye old browser showdown on my comp (Fresh everything). Firefox and Chrome are very similar in speed with Java benchmarks, but once you get into the "real-world" type benchmarks, Firefox was faster by a large margin and was almost 3x as fast as Chrome in some tests.
Each browser has it's strengths and weaknesses it seems, So I run all of them lol
For my day to day tab filled behemoth I have to use Firefox, any other browser can't handle the ~80 tabs I have open at once.
In fact me and my roommate have on going challenges on how many tabs we can keep open and up times of the browsers/OS's (He is on Win7). During our battles we have tried tweaking some things and using odd browsers and such, but to be competitive with one another we have to each use Firefox cause it just has that much better memory management/stability.
Here's the page on the BFQ I/O scheduler: http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/
Here's a list of precompiled kernels that have been patched with BFQ (and often some more desktop-use tuning): https://liquorix.net/#install for ubuntu and debian
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/linux-zen/ for archlinux
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tiwai:/bfq/ for opensuse, BFQ as a kernel module
If you're wary of installing things outside of official repositories or compiling your own kernel, then archlinux is the only distro with a kernel option that has BFQ.