søn, 29.08.2004 kl. 11.43 skrev Robert Shearman:
Ove Kaaven wrote:
søn, 29.08.2004 kl. 04.13 skrev Michael Chang:
Also note that Windows allows a Win32 process to boost its own priority all the way to what they call "real time". Only root can do this under Linux. I'm not sure if you need administrator privileges to do this under Windows (probably not), but since every Windows user runs as administrator anyway, it's probably not unlikely that many applications expect this ability anyway.
As decribed here: http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?IssueID=22&ArticleID=302 There are 31 priority levels and only users with Administrator privileges can set processes to the highest priorities of 16-31.
OK, so you need administrator to set a realtime priority, but you are still able to set a high priority on yourself without being an administrator under Windows. This is not possible under Linux, where a non-root process can only reduce, not elevate, its own priority.
I doubt there are programs that require these high priorities, although we could find potential targets by printing a message for programs that try and set their priority to a high level.
For what it's worth, at TransGaming we know for a fact that some games (maybe it was Battlefield 1942) does; they elevate the priority of one of their most critical threads, and seem to use interesting mechanisms to regulate how much time this high-priority thread use relative to the other threads. In any case it does help the game's smoothness to experimentally elevate this thread's priority under Linux, but this is not really a solution because of permissions.