Thanks in advance to anyone that can offer me guidance on my questions... Which is about the priority and addr columns in the 'ps' output


My 1st question is about the priority column (PR PRI)... From what I've read the range of numerical values that exist should be between 1 - 139

But I'm seeing negative numerical values on some kernel threads (migration:-40; watchdog: -40)... And top displays them as 'rt'... Which I thought meant the numerical value of 99 and what I'd expect there

When I look at the output of the irq/18-vmwgfx kernel thread though... ps displays a value of 0... But top displays it as -51

I've searched and haven't seen anything about negative values for priority... Could someone give me a brief explanation of the differences please?

And my second question is about the ADDR column... Which I understand is the starting memory address of a process

This field is always empty... I'm wondering if there's a way to populate this field somehow... Or to understand why nothing appears in it

But once again... thanks!

Some of that depends on the version of ps which you are using and the rest on the options you have passed (or not) to it as you run it. For priority, the numbers range from -20 to 19 and the higher the number the lower the priority for that process. rt means real time priority.

See "man nice", "man 2 nice", "man renice", or "man 7 sched".

Thanks for the reply... Unfortunately, You're talking about the nice of a process... The priority column (PR or PRI) should have a range between 1 - 139

"Kernel threads" are, of course, "parts of the kernel, itself" which are for convenience being dispatched "as a process" so that they can more-easily "do asynchronous things." But they do not play by ordinary rules.