Renice idle process to -20 causes hang.

[Bruce Evans]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Andre Guibert de Bruet wrote:

> On the topic of nice for the idle process(es), shouldn't they be running
> with the highest allowable value (+20)? Though this has no technical
> impact, couldn't they get that nice value for aesthetic purposes?

No, since they have a different scheduling policy than all normal niced
processes and don't behave like nice -20 (nice = +20) processes.  They
sort of behave like nice -21 through nice -52 processes.  top(1) has a
hack which are supposed to display them as having the fake nice values
21 through 52, but it is broken in -current by much the same kernel
changes that break the display of rtprio values in ps(1) (see my other
reply to this thread).

Bruce