...interesting...I get audio distortion/studder/breakage whenever the
console is scrolling...something w/ DMA?  I learned that console scrolling
was thrashing CPU all around earlier when i realized system rebuilds were
taking > 12 hours (277MHz U5 here)  whenever i didn't tee(1) stdout or
2>&1 /dev/null.

Also I like the system LED blink feature in the kernel from auxio.c:
/*
         * Blink rate is:
         *      full cycle every second if completely idle (loadav = 0)
         *      full cycle every 2 seconds if loadav = 1
         *      full cycle every 3 seconds if loadav = 2
         * etc.
*/

...another idea I had was alternatively feeding the signal for the LED to
something like network or fixed disk activity, or would that be too trendy
>:}

-lava