On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 01:11:01PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > Very low priority can starve others when it holds some kernel resource > needed by another task.
Nevertheless ordinary users are permitted to lower priority ([re]nice) and resource limits (setrlimit). > For IO I suppose the same could happen too. e.g. low priority > task wants to write out a page and keeps it locked until the IO > is finished. High priority task wants to access the page and has > to wait until it is unlocked. Middle task generates an endless > stream of IO that makes the idle priority writeout never finish. I don't quite understand. There are a lot of other ways to starve such high-priority process: 1. renice the low-priority process 2. send it a signal 3. ptrace it 4. use something like cpulimit (http://cpulimit.sourceforge.net/) to stall it .... So I think current behaviour of ionice is inconsistent (and pointless). P.S. Please CC me, I'm not subscribed. Best regards, Alexei -- All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
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