sched: Allow users with sufficient RLIMIT_NICE to change from SCHED_I…

…DLE policy

The current scheduler implementation returns -EPERM when trying to
change from SCHED_IDLE to SCHED_OTHER or SCHED_BATCH. Since SCHED_IDLE
is considered to be a nice 20 on steroids, changing to another policy
should be allowed provided the RLIMIT_NICE is accounted for.

This patch allows the following test-case to pass with RLIMIT_NICE=40,
but still fail with RLIMIT_NICE=10 when the calling process is run
from a typical shell (nice 0, or 20 in rlimit terms).

int main()
{
	int ret;
	struct sched_param sp;
	sp.sched_priority = 0;

	/* switch to SCHED_IDLE */
	ret = sched_setscheduler(0, SCHED_IDLE, &sp);
	printf("setscheduler IDLE: %d\n", ret);
	if (ret) return ret;

	/* switch back to SCHED_OTHER */
	ret = sched_setscheduler(0, SCHED_OTHER, &sp);
	printf("setscheduler OTHER: %d\n", ret);

	return ret;
}

 $ ulimit -e
 40
 $ ./test
 setscheduler IDLE: 0
 setscheduler OTHER: 0

 $ ulimit -e 10
 $ ulimit -e
 10
 $ ./test
 setscheduler IDLE: 0
 setscheduler OTHER: -1

Signed-off-by: Darren Hart <dvhart@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>
LKML-Reference: <4D657BEE.4040608@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

kernel/sched.c

@@ -4981,12 +4981,15 @@ static int __sched_setscheduler(struct task_struct *p, int policy,
 			    param->sched_priority > rlim_rtprio)
 				return -EPERM;
 		}
+
 		/*
-		 * Like positive nice levels, dont allow tasks to
-		 * move out of SCHED_IDLE either:
+		 * Treat SCHED_IDLE as nice 20. Only allow a switch to
+		 * SCHED_NORMAL if the RLIMIT_NICE would normally permit it.
 		 */
-		if (p->policy == SCHED_IDLE && policy != SCHED_IDLE)
-			return -EPERM;
+		if (p->policy == SCHED_IDLE && policy != SCHED_IDLE) {
+			if (!can_nice(p, TASK_NICE(p)))
+				return -EPERM;
+		}
 
 		/* can't change other user's priorities */
 		if (!check_same_owner(p))