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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | EXAMPLES | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY |
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IONICE(1) User Commands IONICE(1)
ionice - set or get process I/O scheduling class and priority
ionice [-c class] [-n level] [-t] -p PID
ionice [-c class] [-n level] [-t] -P PGID
ionice [-c class] [-n level] [-t] -u UID
ionice [-c class] [-n level] [-t] command [argument] ...
This program sets or gets the I/O scheduling class and priority
for a program. If no arguments or just -p is given, ionice will
query the current I/O scheduling class and priority for that
process.
When command is given, ionice will run this command with the given
arguments. If no class is specified, then command will be executed
with the "best-effort" scheduling class. The default priority
level is 4.
As of this writing, a process can be in one of three scheduling
classes:
Idle
A program running with idle I/O priority will only get disk
time when no other program has asked for disk I/O for a
defined grace period. The impact of an idle I/O process on
normal system activity should be zero. This scheduling class
does not take a priority argument. Presently, this scheduling
class is permitted for an ordinary user (since kernel 2.6.25).
Best-effort
This is the effective scheduling class for any process that
has not asked for a specific I/O priority. This class takes a
priority argument from 0-7, with a lower number being higher
priority. Programs running at the same best-effort priority
are served in a round-robin fashion.
Note that before kernel 2.6.26 a process that has not asked
for an I/O priority formally uses "none" as scheduling class,
but the I/O scheduler will treat such processes as if it were
in the best-effort class. The priority within the best-effort
class will be dynamically derived from the CPU nice level of
the process: io_priority = (cpu_nice + 20) / 5.
For kernels after 2.6.26 with the CFQ I/O scheduler, a process
that has not asked for an I/O priority inherits its CPU
scheduling class. The I/O priority is derived from the CPU
nice level of the process (same as before kernel 2.6.26).
Realtime
The RT scheduling class is given first access to the disk,
regardless of what else is going on in the system. Thus the RT
class needs to be used with some care, as it can starve other
processes. As with the best-effort class, 8 priority levels
are defined denoting how big a time slice a given process will
receive on each scheduling window. This scheduling class is
not permitted for an ordinary (i.e., non-root) user.
-c, --class class
Specify the name or number of the scheduling class to use; 0
for none, 1 for realtime, 2 for best-effort, 3 for idle.
-n, --classdata level
Specify the scheduling class data. This only has an effect if
the class accepts an argument. For realtime and best-effort,
0-7 are valid data (priority levels), and 0 represents the
highest priority level.
-p, --pid PID...
Specify the process IDs of running processes for which to get
or set the scheduling parameters.
-P, --pgid PGID...
Specify the process group IDs of running processes for which
to get or set the scheduling parameters.
-t, --ignore
Ignore failure to set the requested priority. If command was
specified, run it even in case it was not possible to set the
desired scheduling priority, which can happen due to
insufficient privileges or an old kernel version.
-u, --uid UID...
Specify the user IDs of running processes for which to get or
set the scheduling parameters.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version and exit.
Linux supports I/O scheduling priorities and classes since 2.6.13
with the CFQ I/O scheduler.
• # ionice -c 3 -p 89
Sets process with PID 89 as an idle I/O process.
• # ionice -c 2 -n 0 bash
Runs 'bash' as a best-effort program with highest priority.
• # ionice -p 89 91
Prints the class and priority of the processes with PID 89 and 91.
Jens Axboe <jens@axboe.dk>, Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>
ioprio_set(2)
For bug reports, use the issue tracker
<https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.
The ionice command is part of the util-linux package which can be
downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page is
part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux utilities)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
was found in the repository was 2025-08-05.) If you discover any
rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux 2.42-start-521-ec46 2025-01-16 IONICE(1)
Pages that refer to this page: ioprio_set(2), btrfs-scrub(8), iotop(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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