Making power policy just work [LWN.net]

Making power policy just work

Posted Jul 3, 2008 8:24 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (guest, #31018)
Parent article: Making power policy just work

> Peter Zijlstra observed that he has niced processes (created with distcc) which should have
access to all of the CPU power available, but which should not contend with interactive
processes on the same system.

Maybe the interactive task should be niced upwards, rather than distcc downwards. Looks like
what he is really trying to achieve: a reactive desktop even with distcc running at full
blast.

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Making power policy just work

Posted Jul 3, 2008 12:54 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

I think that 'priority' and 'interactivity' are two separate things and it's a mistake to use
a single niceness level for both.

My bash process shouldn't have a high priority if it starts chewing CPU time for long periods,
but it needs to respond quickly to user input and then go back to sleep.

Making power policy just work

Posted Jul 3, 2008 15:28 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

I had a boss a while ago who liked to lecture on the difference between "urgent" and
"important". Not everything which is important needs attention right away, and there are some
things which need to be responded to quickly but which aren't, in the big picture, as
important. In this case, your bash prompt is urgent, but isn't necessarily as important as a
background application.