Since pdflush was converted to be launched by the kthread infrastructure it has inherited keventd's `nice -10' setting. That hurts interactivity when pdflush is doing lots of work writing back through the dm-crypt layer. So set pdflush back to `nice 0'. --- 25-akpm/mm/pdflush.c | 6 ++++++ 1 files changed, 6 insertions(+) diff -puN mm/pdflush.c~pdflush-nice-0 mm/pdflush.c --- 25/mm/pdflush.c~pdflush-nice-0 2004-03-30 01:59:17.795116816 -0800 +++ 25-akpm/mm/pdflush.c 2004-03-30 02:02:29.865917616 -0800 @@ -177,6 +177,12 @@ static int __pdflush(struct pdflush_work static int pdflush(void *dummy) { struct pdflush_work my_work; + + /* + * pdflush can spend a lot of time doing encryption via dm-crypt. We + * don't want to do that at keventd's priority. + */ + set_user_nice(current, 0); return __pdflush(&my_work); } _