Re: [PATCH] mm: yield during swap prefetching

[Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>]

On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 13:22 +1100, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > How is the scheduler supposed to know to penalize a kernel compile
> > taking 100% CPU but not a game using 100% CPU?
> 
> Because being a serious desktop operating system that we are (bwahahahaha) 
> means the user should not have special privileges to run something as simple 
> as a game. Games should not need special scheduling classes. We can always 
> use 'nice' for a compile though. Real time audio is a completely different 
> world to this.  

Actually recent distros like the upcoming Ubuntu Dapper support the new
RLIMIT_NICE and RLIMIT_RTPRIO so this would Just Work without any
special privileges (well, not root anyway - you'd have to put the user
in the right group and add one line to /etc/security/limits.conf).

I think OSX also uses special scheduling classes for stuff with RT
constraints.

The only barrier I see is that games aren't specifically written to take
advantage of RT scheduling because historically it's only been available
to root.

Lee