Question

The man page for nice says "nice() adds inc to the nice value for the calling process. So, can we use it to change the nice value for a thread created by pthread_create?

EDIT:
It seems that we can set the nice value per thread.

I wrote an application, setting different nice values for different threads, and observed that the "nicer" thread has been scheduled with lower priority. Checking the output, I found that the string "high priority ……………." gets outputted more frequently.

void * thread_function1(void *arg)
{
  const pid_t tid = syscall(SYS_gettid);

  int ret = setpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, tid, -10);
  printf("tid of high priority thread %d , %d\n", tid ,getpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, tid));
  while(1)
  {
    printf("high priority ................\n");
  }
}


void * thread_function(void *arg)
{
  const pid_t tid = syscall(SYS_gettid);
  int ret = setpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, tid, 10);
  printf("tid of low priority thread %d , %d \n", tid ,getpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, tid));
  while(1)
  {
    printf("lower priority\n");
  }
}


int main()
{
  pthread_t id1;
  pthread_t id2;

  pid_t pid = getpid();
  pid_t tid = syscall(SYS_gettid);

  printf("main thread : pid = %d , tid = %d \n" , pid, tid);
  pthread_create(&id1, NULL, thread_function1,  NULL);
  pthread_create(&id2, NULL,thread_function,   NULL);

  pthread_join(id1, NULL);
  pthread_join(id2, NULL);
}

Answer 1

The pthreads man page says:

POSIX.1 also requires that threads share a range of other attributes
(i.e., these attributes are process-wide rather than per-thread):

[…]

• nice value (setpriority(2))

So, theoretically, the “niceness” value is global to the process and shared by all threads, and you should not be able to set a specific niceness for one or more individual threads.

However, the very same man page also says:

LinuxThreads

The notable features of this implementation are the following:

[…]

• Threads do not share a common nice value.

NPTL

[…]

NPTL still has a few non-conformances with POSIX.1:

• Threads do not share a common nice value.

So it turns out that both threading implementations on Linux (LinuxThreads and NPTL) actually violate POSIX.1, and you can set a specific niceness for one or more individual threads by passing a tid to setpriority() on these systems.