[mythtv-users] Can you "nice" an I/O process

Osma Ahvenlampi oa at iki.fi
Sun Apr 9 15:25:01 UTC 2006


On pe, 2006-04-07 at 14:03 -0600, Brian Wood wrote:
> I know how you can "nice" a process to control its use of CPU  
> resources. What I am wondering is if there is a similar function with  
> I/O, specifically disk reads/writes ?

Since Linux 2.6.12 or so, yes, you CAN set a "nice" value to a process's
I/O, and you can even do this independently from its CPU "nice" value
(in effect allowing something to use a lot of CPU and only idle disk
bandwidth, or vice versa - great for transcoding and recording, in
fact).

However, this is relatively early in the life of that functionality, and
it's difficult to utilise. Nice'd processes automatically have their
ioprio adjusted as well, but changing it otherwise you must have root
privileges - it's not even possible for a user process to set itself to
the idle class.

http://www.linux-m32r.org/lxr/http/source/Documentation/block/ioprio.txt

-- 
Osma Ahvenlampi   <oa at iki.fi>    http://www.fishpool.org



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