What makes it possible for a `pulseaudio’ process to get the nice level of -11

In fact, RLIMIT_NICE allows you to bypass the basic rule that says that "a process can raise its nice value only if owned by root".

Demonstration:

# ulimit -e 30
# su nobody
$ nice -n -10 top

You will see that your top process runs with niceness -10.

Now if you try nice -n -11 top, it will run with niceness 0, because -11 is not allowed by RLIMIT_NICE=30.

The formula is given in the manpage: the maximal niceness allowed is 20-rlimit. So:

• 0 means "you can raise niceness to 20", a.k.a. useless;
• 20 means "you can raise niceness to 0", which lets you go back to 0 if you lowered your priority;
• 40 means "you can start processes up to nice -n -20.

The proportion of the processor time a particular process receives is determined by the relative difference in niceness between it and other runnable processes.

The Linux Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) calculates a weight based on the niceness. The weight is roughly equivalent to 1024 / (1.25 ^ nice_value). As the nice value decreases the weight increases exponentially. The timeslice allocated for the process is proportional to the weight of the process divided by the total weight of all runnable processes. The implementation of the CFS is in kernel/sched/fair.c.

The CFS has a target latency for the scheduling duration. Smaller target latencies yield better interactivity, but as the target latency decreases, the switching overhead increases, thus decreasing the overall throughput.

Given for instance a target latency of 20 milliseconds and two runnable processes of equal niceness, then both processes will run for 10 milliseconds each before being pre-empted in favour of the the other process. If there are 10 processes of equal niceness, each runs for 2 milliseconds each.

Now consider two processes, one with a niceness of 0 (the default), the other with a niceness of 5. The proportional difference between the corresponding weights is roughly 1/3, meaning that the higher priority process receives a timeslice of approximately 15 milliseconds while the lower priority process receives a timeslice of 5 milliseconds.

Lastly consider two processes with the niceness values of 5 and 10 respectively. While the absolute niceness is larger in this case, the relative differences between the niceness values is the same as in the previous example, yielding an identical timeslice division.