> David Schleef wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 09:25:12PM -0500, cd_smith@ou.edu wrote:
> > > Anyone thought about allowing soft RT (SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR) tasks with
> > > negative priorities? These would only be executed if no other tasks of
> > > any type are there. Giving a normal Linux task a niceness value won't do
> > > this, as the task will still get some CPU time.
> > >
> > > I was just thinking back to past projects, and about a year ago I wished I
> > > had something like this to do background housekeeping tasks for a
> > > distributed application I was writing -- I wanted to do them if possible
> > > on a free system, and only schedule time on some system if they didn't get
> > > scheduled anyway.
> > >
> > > Since I'm sure this isn't a new idea, any good reasons not to allow this?
> > > (surely there can't be security implications, right?) I'm not really
> > > interested in doing it myself right now, but I might in the future if
> > > there aren't good reasons otherwise.
>
> Chris, I worked on a Unix system a long time ago ('86), and there they
> defined "nice 19" to be "when nobody else wants the CPU". That was a
> VERY handy system. For example: rc5des would not consume the 3-5% of
> the CPU of my system when I'm actually doing something CPUbound.
Additionally, that is exactly what the SETI@Home documentation recommends
for automatic usage of the client from a crontab.
-Gary Simmons
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