> If a process has received user
> input in the past, ir's pretty probable that the process is an
> interactive one.
<snip>
> So then, why I can easily starve the X11 server (which should be marked
> interactive), Evolution or OpenOffice simply by running "while true; do
> a=2; done". Why don't they get an increased priority boost to stop the
> from behaving so jerky?
You're own metric will kill you here. You're while true; loop is
running in the shell, which is interactive (it has accepted user in put
in the past) and can therefore easily starve anything else. You need a
an easy way to make an interactive process non-interactive, and that's
what these threads are all about, making interactive threads
non-interactive (and the other way around) in a fashion that maximises
the user experience. A history of user input is not necessarily a good
metric, as many non-interactive CPU hogs start out life as interactive
threads (like your loop above).
-- Daniel Gryniewicz <dang@fprintf.net>- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/