Unable to enable DMA on some AMD systems

[Jago Pearce]

Ah ha! Struck gold in the mailing list archives!

When I copy something off CD my GUI and everything slows down.

What should my /etc/modules look like?

Also:

I notice that CPU cycle management is awful and odd too. If a program
such as edonkey or DirectConnect starts hashing MD5 sums everything
starts to crawl. Even renice'ing these programs to a low priority
(such as 16) doesn't help. Nor does increasing the priority of X to
-1.

Have the Ubuntu team tried to speed X/GUI somehow and inadvertently
allowed CPU intensive graphical apps to run away with cycles?