The nix.daemonNiceLevel options allows for setting the nice level of the
Nix daemon process. On a modern Linux kernel with group scheduling the
nice level only affects threads relative to other threads in the same
task group (see sched(7)). Therefore this option has not the effect one
might expect.
The options daemonCPUSchedPolicy and daemonIOSchedClass are introduced
and the daemonIONiceLevel option renamed to daemonIOSchedPrority for
consistency. These options allow for more effective control over CPU
and I/O scheduling.
Instead of setting daemonNiceLevel to a high value to increase the
responsiveness of an interactive system during builds -- which would not
have the desired effect, as described above -- one could set both
daemonCPUSchedPolicy and daemonIOSchedClass to idle.