[ltp] Re: New thinkpad recomendation

[Richard Neill]

Michael Karcher wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 11.12.2008, 16:31 +0100 schrieb Christoph Bier:
>>> start them in the background, on a 
>>> different virtual desktop, niced and ioniced. 
>> I try to run programs as I need them to save power (to prevent needless 
>> CPU wake ups). But maybe this is a wrong assumption ...
> If that's an issue, you could try to SIGSTOP the processes instead of
> just nicing them. 

I was actually suggesting using nice/ionice to start the process, get it 
loaded into RAM, then kill it, thereby leaving the binary cached for 
faster startup. Though I agree SIGSTOP is nicer. ionice is particularly 
important - it makes the app undemanding of disk access.


Another point: IIRC users can only make their
> processes nicer, but never return to the original priority. How do you
> (Richard) unnice them if you need them?

You can use renice to get down to 0 again - use
   renice  NICENESS  PID
where NICENESS is 0..20  (unless you are root, in which case you can 
have a negative number).

On a laptop with a single-user, I'd also consider that passwordless 
sudo, or a setuid-root perl script is an acceptable security choice.

Richard


> 
> Regrads,
>   Michael Karcher