Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Seriously. Nobody _ever_ does "nice make", unless they are seriously repressed beta-males (eg MIS people who get shouted at when they do system maintenance unless they hide in dark corners and don't get discovered). It just doesn't happen.

-- Linus Torvalds

If we had the Macro of Invinicibility (true stable events), then this would not be an issue for us. But unfortunately, the Macro of Invincibility is not here, and is probably buried somewhere with an old gay wizard.

-- Steven Rostedt (who is evidently reading (or watching) too much Harry Potter)

(Log in to post comments)

Quotes of the week

Posted Dec 9, 2010 10:37 UTC (Thu) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

Another funny quote from Linus concerning 'nice' : "There really isn't anything to fix. 'nice' is what it is. It's a simple legacy interface to scheduler priority. The fact that it's also almost totally useless is irrelevant. It's like male nipples. We wouldn't be better off lactating, and they look like some odd wart that doesn't do much good. But it would be worse to remove it."

Link : http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1071951

seriously repressed beta-male here

Posted Dec 9, 2010 23:42 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Wow, so that's my problem! Over the years I've often used nice with make. Now, the application for this was a regression system driven by make -j to control the degree of parallelism, and these days I use much, um, nicer grid-based solutions. But when I faced a situation of needing to use the same servers for regression runs as well as compile/debug/edit, it was a reasonable way to balance the workload.

I suppose an alternative would be to become internationally famous and have people shower me with more CPU resources, disk space and network bandwidth than I could ever use, and I would then work on having the thing run full blast and warm up the planet. Ah, but I'm a quiet little beta. Sorry for disturbing you all.

seriously repressed beta-male here

Posted Dec 10, 2010 16:09 UTC (Fri) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]

Seconded.
Furthermoer, it could be a a general situation if people who do not use nice are those who have more ressources than they need. Do you think those could be forced to give some of their resources to the others? :o)
As a bonus, it may provide a good incentive for promoting "nice usage".

seriously repressed beta-male here

Posted Dec 10, 2010 18:27 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

I guess what Linus is pointing out is, that those doing makes are usually doing it from their own desktop, and probably don't care too much if that make causes their web browsing to slow down while they wait for the make to finish.

Now if you are using a production system to do builds, then that is a totally different category, and you are in the minority compared to the number that do what was described above. Hence, Linus is more worried about the masses than the niche that actually do real work. ;-)

nice make

Posted Dec 10, 2010 19:40 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I think you missed the point. If you have a Linus-level personal desktop system, your web browsing slows down for a minute or two while the make proceeds, and you weren't going to get much else done until the make finished anyway.

But if your make takes an hour, you're not going to wait for it -- you're going to work on something else while it runs. And you'd much rather have the make take ten minutes more than slow down whatever interactive work you're trying to do at the same time during that hour. For example, a smaller make of something else.

Quotes of the week

Posted Dec 18, 2010 10:55 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

I always use nice for much the same reason (the kernel's build is all scripted and I long ago put it in the scripts).

Of course being a Gentooer, I suppose the in-kind reply would be:

"/Real/ alpha males use that niced make, possibly in the form of Gentoo's PORTAGE_NICENESS setting, for their monthly multi-hundred-package (split-packages, or half-dozen to a dozen monolithic-packages) kde-micro-version update, so they can continue working on other things while it takes place."

Duncan