Allow to limit the bandwidth of I/O-intensive processes, like backupIt would seem to me that this would be vastly more useful in the real world if there were a settable default, so that administrators could avoid having to find and tune individual user processes. And it would seem far less common that the admin would want to set the limit *up* for a given process, and it's likely to be one known to the admin, at least by name.
tools running in background, large files copy, checksums on huge files,
etc.
This kind of processes can noticeably impact the system responsiveness
for some time and playing with tasks' priority is not always an
acceptable solution.
This patch allows to specify a maximum I/O rate in sectors per second
for each single process via /proc/<PID>/io_throttle (default is zero,
that specify no limit).