Re: [Bug-gnubg] Doing a rollout as a background job

[Timothy Y. Chow]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Michael Petch wrote:
> On 11/08/09 8:36 AM, "Timothy Y. Chow" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > setpriority: Permission denied
> 
> Definitely not Gnubg. Nice/renice can't be set less than 0 as nonroot 
> users. Were you using root privs previously when it worked and now a non 
> root user?

Investigating further, I think I may have been misreading the output I was 
getting before, and that gnubg was being successfully niced after all.  So 
my problem may have gone away.

However, I don't think it's quite accurate to say "Definitely not Gnubg,"
because the file set.c has a function SetPriority that calls the system 
function setpriority() (provided the latter function exists; this is 
verified at configuration time).  That seems to be the routine that is 
generating the "setpriority: Permission denied" error.  However, I'm 
having trouble tracking down the problem any further because I can't 
figure out how SetPriority is actually called in gnubg.

There is an annoying fact about "nice" which is that some conventions have 
changed over the years.  Some versions of nice think that -19 is nice 
whereas other versions think that +19 is nice.  Also there is a 
distinction between niceness and priority.  There could be a conflict 
caused by my using a version of nice that is incompatible with gnubg.
The version I'm using gives the following usage information:

====
Run COMMAND with an adjusted scheduling priority.
With no COMMAND, print the current scheduling priority.  ADJUST is 10
by default.  Range goes from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest).

  -n, --adjustment=ADJUST   increment priority by ADJUST first
      --help     display this help and exit
      --version  output version information and exit

Report bugs to <address@hidden>.
====

I'm running it with the command

  /bin/nice -19 gnubg -t <rollout >& rollout.log &

I'm thinking maybe the right way to do things is not to use nice 
explicitly at all, but to use a gnubg option (does such an option exist?) 
to set the priority.

Tim