Re: 2.5.74-mm1

Daniel Phillips
2003-07-07T14:17:36Z

On Monday 07 July 2003 15:09, Alex Riesen wrote:
> Daniel Phillips, Mon, Jul 07, 2003 14:24:06 +0200:
> > In retrospect, the idea of renicing all the applications but the
> > realtime one doesn't work, because it doesn't take care of
> > applications started afterwards.
>
> start login niced to -X ?

Actually, the opposite: start login niced to +X (x ~= 5). This is a tidy way
of providing the user with the needed manuevering room on the not-nice side,
and is guaranteed not to interfere with root processes. All logins on that
machine would have to start with that same positive niceness, including for
example, ssh logins. The correct place to centralize this is the login
program, I think, perhaps by making it aware of some environment variable or
some setting in /etc.

To work well, this strategy has to be coupled with a scheduler guarantee that
no priority level can completely starve any lower priority. At this point, I
don't know where we stand in that regard.

Regards,

Daniel