Re: [PATCH] VM fix for 2.4.0-test9 & OOM handler

[Kurt Garloff <garloff@suse.de>]

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On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 12:12:02PM +0200, Marco Colombo wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Oct 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:
> [...]
> > They are niced because the user thinks them a bit less
> > important. 
> 
> Please don't, this assumption is quite wrong. I use nice just to be
> 'nice' to other users. I can run my *important* CPU hog simulation
> nice +10 in order to let other people get more CPU when the need it.
> But if you put the logic "niced == not important" somewhere into the
> kernel, nobody will use nice anymore. I'd rather give a bonus to niced
> processes.

I could not agree more. Normally, you'd better kill a foreground task
(running nice 0) than selecting one of those background jobs for some
reasons:
* The foreground job can be restarted by the interactive user
  (Most likely, it will be only netscape anyway)
* The background job probably is the more useful one which has been running
  since a longer time (computations, ...)
* If we put any policy like this into the kernel at all, I'd rather
  encourage the usage of nice instead of discouraging it.

I assume here backgrd job == niced job, which mostly is the case in reality.

Regards,
-- 
Kurt Garloff  <garloff@suse.de>                          Eindhoven, NL
GPG key: See mail header, key servers         Linux kernel development
SuSE GmbH, Nuernberg, FRG                               SCSI, Security

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