I was listening to a webcast in Channel 9 on Windows Vista I/O

Narayanan Ganapathy amazed me when he said there are priorities for I/O in Windows Vista, like we have thread priorities. I hope all the indexing services listen to the webcast and run under idle priority.

One more thing which was really cool was the concept of "Bandwidth Requests" where you could specify when making a I/O request to the I/O manager to satisfy the I/O request at a particular I/O rate. These are obviously hints which OS needs to use when it does its I/O operations. The OS maintains seperate prioritized I/O queues based on the hints provided and satisfies the requests at the requested I/O rate (or SLA - System Level Agreement :)

The last aspect which was worth noting is the ability to cancel a synchronous I/O operation which is not possible to do in XP and causes most of the hang situations. This is good as not many use Overlapped I/O and prefer to use Synchronous I/O as it is easy to program.

It is really a nice watch, and I strongly recommend the same..

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=239845