Understanding the Linux Kernel

10.3. System Calls Related to Scheduling

Several system calls have been introduced to allow processes to change their priorities and scheduling policies. As a general rule, users are always allowed to lower the priorities of their processes. However, if they want to modify the priorities of processes belonging to some other user or if they want to increase the priorities of their own processes, they must have superuser privileges.

10.3.1. The nice( ) System Call

The nice( )^[7] system call allows processes to change their base priority. The integer value contained in the increment parameter is used to modify the priority field of the process descriptor. The nice Unix command, which allows users to run programs with modified scheduling priority, is based on this system call.

^[7] Since this system call is usually invoked to lower the priority of a process, users who invoke it for their processes are "nice" toward other users.

The sys_nice( ) service routine handles the nice( ) system call. Although the increment parameter may have any value, absolute values larger than 40 are trimmed down to 40. Traditionally, negative values correspond to requests for priority increments and require superuser privileges, while positive ones correspond to requests for priority decrements.

The function starts by copying the value of increment into the newprio local variable. In the case of a negative increment, the function invokes the capable( ) function to verify whether the process has a CAP_SYS_NICE ...