question on 2.4 scheduler, threads, and priority inversion

[Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortel.com>]

I seem to be having an issue with 2.4 and linuxthreads.

I have a program that spawns a child thread, and that child boosts 
itself into a realtime scheduler class.

The child then went crazy and turned into a cpu hog.  At this point, a 
higher-priority task detected the hog, and tried to kill the process by 
sending a "kill -9" to the main thread.  Unfortunately, it appears that 
there is some kind of priority-inversion thing happening, as the process 
did not die.

Is this expected behaviour?  Is there any way around this?  Do I need to 
put the main thread at a higher priority than any of the child threads? 
  What about the manager thread?

Thanks,

Chris