From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262172AbUB2W4p (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:56:45 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262174AbUB2W4p (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:56:45 -0500 Received: from alt.aurema.com ([203.217.18.57]:60076 "EHLO smtp.sw.oz.au") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262172AbUB2W4n (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:56:43 -0500 Message-ID: <40426E1C.8010806@aurema.com> Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 09:56:28 +1100 From: Peter Williams Organization: Aurema Pty Ltd User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Joachim B Haga CC: Timothy Miller , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] O(1) Entitlement Based Scheduler References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Joachim B Haga wrote: > Peter Williams writes: > > >>>>They already do e.g. renice is such a program. >>> >>>No one's talking about LOWERING priority here. You can only DoS >>>someone else if you can set negative nice values, and non-root >>>can't do that. >> >>Which is why root has to be in control of the mechanism. > > > It seems to me that much of this could be solved if the user *were* > allowed to lower nice values (down to 0). > > Right now the only way I can prioritize between my own processes by > starting important/timing sensitive programs normally and everything > else reniced. The problem is that the first category consists of one > or two programs while the second category is, well, "everything else". > > I would *love* to be able to start the window manager and all children > at +10 and be able to adjust priorities, from 0 (important user-level) > to 10 (normal) to 20. Negative values could still be root-only. > > So why shouldn't this be possible? Because a greedy user in a > multi-user system would just run everything at max prio thus defeating > the purpose? Sure, that would be annoying but it would have another > solution ie. an entitlement based scheduler or something. More importantly it would allow ordinary users to override root's settings e.g. if (for whatever reason) the sysadmin decided to renice a task to 19 (say) this modification would allow the owner of the task to renice it back to zero. This is the reason that it isn't be allowed. Peter -- Dr Peter Williams, Chief Scientist peterw@aurema.com Aurema Pty Limited Tel:+61 2 9698 2322 PO Box 305, Strawberry Hills NSW 2012, Australia Fax:+61 2 9699 9174 79 Myrtle Street, Chippendale NSW 2008, Australia http://www.aurema.com