Value range

Posted May 5, 2005 7:52 UTC (Thu) by Ross (guest, #4065)
Parent article: Audio latency - resource limits win

The values could at least match the name: smaller values should be less
nice and larger values more nice. Or maybe they should name the resource
"notnice" :)

Value range

Posted May 5, 2005 21:28 UTC (Thu) by phiggins (subscriber, #5605) [Link] (1 responses)

I was thinking the same thing at first, but since we are talking about a limit, it makes more sense to have increasing privilege correspond to an increasing limit. That way it's more like all the other limits. It's really the negative values for nice that are weird.

Value range

Posted May 6, 2005 23:48 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

You're both right. The name should be RLIMIT_MEAN. A limit on how mean you can be.

I don't know anything about the early history of nice, but I suspect the negative values were an add-on. I think someone setting out to design a general CPU share setting wouldn't do it that way.