nice

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!hpvax!sri-unix!MBM at MIT-XX]

certain programs as a priori entitled to better schdeduling
service than others.  In particular, we would like to favor
screen editors and other human interactive programs at the
expense of number crunchers, but the question is general.

We have been making such jobs setuid to root and having them 
minus nice themselves, but this seems messy, dangerous, and
a nuisance.  

Several possibilities are being considered:
1) use setgid instead, and let group 0 (or some group(s))
   reduce their nice; this is somewhat less dangerous.

2) use the SVTX bit (sticky text) to also mean for the scheduler
   to be more generous with jobs using such text (I could never
   be sure that sticky  text helped much anyway)

3) perhaps in conjunction with 2, use the unused word in the
   a.out header for the base nice priority

Yes, I know I could just make a front end for each such program ,
but that seems just as messy as editing every program to nice
itself and then do setuid(getuid).  Comments?
--mike
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