How can I see which program is using alot of I/O from the HD?

[Chuck Vose]

You're right, it would be nice eto have this in the kernel and I'll
email oli about it but who knows if it'll happen. For now you do one
of two things, roll your own kernel (which is easy btw), or we can
keep looking. My guess is that if the atop kids thought it was
neccessary to patch the kernel then there may not be a good way to get
this info without doing exactly the same.

What I would do personally is have a second kernel just for using atop
when things are hairy. This way you don't have to roll a new one each
time it comes out. Or you could set up a cron script that will build a
new kernel each time a new source comes into the repos.

Either way would be pretty easy so I leave the choice to you. I'll be
happy to provide direction of course. In the m eantime I'm going to
email oli about how to get this into the ubuntu kernel patches (but at
best this would make it into hoary or the release after hoary, so up
to a year or more before it happens).

-Chuck