Users and setpriority()

Sean Chittenden sean at chittenden.org
Wed Apr 9 06:20:38 PDT 2003


> First on topic post!

Kind of...  :) This list is more geared toward server performance, but
that's not to say that desktop computing isn't performance sensitive
or off topic...

> Currently, setpriority() doesn't allow non- uid 0 users to use a
> nice value *below* 0. If you set "priority" in /etc/login.conf to a
> higher value, all you are doing is making every stinking process on
> the system run at that value initially, which is a disaster.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by disaster, this isn't a
problem unless a system's CPU resources are in contention.  If it
isn't, then the scheduler won't need to rely on the priority value of
a process to make scheduling decisions on what processes get how much
of the CPUs time.

> My question is: Is there, or will there be a facility to allow
> certain non-root users to set higher/raise nice values?  This would
> be a dream for desktop machines where there is essentially one user,
> because that user could have a non-zero uid, and control of process
> scheduling.

There isn't a mechanism other than sudo renice (as already suggested).
-sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden



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