kern/81951: [patch] linux emulation: getpriority() returns incorrect value

[Andriy Gapon]

The following reply was made to PR kern/81951; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Andriy Gapon <avg at icyb.net.ua>
To: Bruce Evans <bde at zeta.org.au>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at freebsd.org, freebsd-emulation at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: kern/81951: [patch] linux emulation: getpriority() returns incorrect
 value
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:34:20 +0300

 on 11.06.2005 21:37 Bruce Evans said the following:
 > Summary: I don't like the committed version since it has many subtle
 > magic numbers in its 20 - X formula:
 > 20: part of Linux adjustment.  20 = 1 + Linux's maximum priority.
 > -1: another part of Linux adjustment
 > 1: factor of 20/20 for the scaling step, where the first 20 is what should
 >     be Linux's NZERO and the second 20 is what should be FreeBSD's NZERO
 >     (= (PRIO_MAX - PRIO_MIN) / 2).  Note that these 20's are subtly
 >     different from the 20 in Linux's adjustment.
 > 0: bias for the scaling step (= FreeBSD NZERO).
 > 
 
 Bruce,
 
 I agree with your reasoning and description of the situation. Yes,
 "20-X" formula would be broken  if there are any significant changes in
 Linux or FreeBSD kernels with respect to process priorities.
 Unfortunately I can not promise to do any work to make this conversion
 more proper, so I suggest that we keep 20-X plus, maybe, /*XXX*/ comment
 until somebody makes it perfect. Having no conversion would be (was!)
 worse, I think.
 
 Returning to a more general level, I also agree with you that POSIX
 should specify only interfaces and it is very strange that they talk
 about some internal states; they made things more confusing while
 perhaps trying to explain them better. I found the following note in
 AIX man page:
 
 http://publib16.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/libs/basetrf1/basetrf1tfrm.htm
 Process priorities in AT&T System V are defined in the range of 0 to 39,
 rather than -20 to 20 as in BSD, and the nice library routine is
 supported by both. Accordingly, two versions of the nice are supported
 by AIX Version 3. The default version behaves like the AT&T System V
 version, with the Increment parameter treated as the modifier of a value
 in the range of 0 to 39 (0 corresponds to -20, 39 corresponds to 9, and
 priority 20 is not reachable with this interface).
 
 If I read this correctly, POSIX authors tried to cater to both worlds,
 so they designed (or merely described) something that has an interface
 close to BSD internals while talking about mapping it to SysV internals.
 Having historical nice(2) system call has probably also added its share
 of complexity.
 
 As to the [-20,+20] range, I see in HP-UX, Solaris and AIX man pages
 that they also have this range. Seems that BSD won over POSIX (and SysV)
 in this case.
 
 -- 
 Andriy Gapon