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  • Olivier Croquette's avatar
    [PATCH] Changing RT priority without CAP_SYS_NICE · 37e4ab3f
    Olivier Croquette authored
    
    
    Presently, a process without the capability CAP_SYS_NICE can not change
    its own policy, which is OK.
    
    But it can also not decrease its RT priority (if scheduled with policy
    SCHED_RR or SCHED_FIFO), which is what this patch changes.
    
    The rationale is the same as for the nice value: a process should be
    able to require less priority for itself. Increasing the priority is
    still not allowed.
    
    This is for example useful if you give a multithreaded user process a RT
    priority, and the process would like to organize its internal threads
    using priorities also. Then you can give the process the highest
    priority needed N, and the process starts its threads with lower
    priorities: N-1, N-2...
    
    The POSIX norm says that the permissions are implementation specific, so
    I think we can do that.
    
    In a sense, it makes the permissions consistent whatever the policy is:
    with this patch, process scheduled by SCHED_FIFO, SCHED_RR and
    SCHED_OTHER can all decrease their priority.
    
    From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    
    cleaned up and merged to -mm.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    37e4ab3f