[Rpm-maint] [PATCH] Reset nice and ionice priorities.

David Martínez Moreno ender at fb.com
Tue Mar 31 19:08:45 UTC 2015


    Hello, first post to the list!  It's no secret that at Facebook we use
internally CentOS and we discovered a nasty side effect of dealing with it.

    In order to alleviate the CPU & I/O needed for e.g. multi-package upgrades
in our servers, some months we considered running an entire yum upgrade wrapped
on nice and ionice to soften the effect of the upcoming storm on the system.  It
was great until we found unrelated services running on a weird nice level.

    The reason was that fork() translates the nice/ionice priorites to its
children.  Think about e.g. sshd being nice'd, and then think about installing
and starting some random service through an automated SSH connection.

    I am proud to be the first pull request in your shiny new Github repo. :-D 
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/pull/1 is our solution to this. 
With it, you are safe to run rpm in such a wrapper, because we will reset nice
and ionice values right after fork() to the system defaults.

    I have a patch against 4.8.0-38.el6_6 but I don't think anyone else will
want it. ;-)

    Thanks in advance,


        Ender.
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