sd_event_source_set_priority, sd_event_source_get_priority, SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_IMPORTANT, SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_NORMAL, SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_IDLE — Set or retrieve the priority of event sources
#include <systemd/sd-event.h>
enum {SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_IMPORTANT= -100,SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_NORMAL= 0,SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_IDLE= 100, };
| int sd_event_source_set_priority( | sd_event_source *source, | 
| int64_t priority ); | 
| int sd_event_source_get_priority( | sd_event_source *source, | 
| int64_t *priority ); | 
sd_event_source_set_priority() may be
    used to set the priority for the event source object specified as
    source. The priority is specified as an
    arbitrary signed 64-bit integer. The priority is initialized to
    SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_NORMAL (0) when the event
    source is allocated with a call such as
    sd_event_add_io(3)
    or
    sd_event_add_time(3),
    and may be changed with this call. If multiple event sources have seen events at the same time, they are dispatched in the order indicated by the
    event sources' priorities. Event sources with smaller priority
    values are dispatched first. As well-known points of reference,
    the constants SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_IMPORTANT
    (-100), SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_NORMAL (0) and
    SD_EVENT_PRIORITY_IDLE (100) may be used to
    indicate event sources that shall be dispatched early, normally or
    late. It is recommended to specify priorities based on these
    definitions, and relative to them — however, the full 64-bit
    signed integer range is available for ordering event
    sources.
Priorities define the order in which event sources that have seen events are dispatched. Care should be taken to ensure that high-priority event sources (those with negative priority values assigned) do not cause starvation of low-priority event sources (those with positive priority values assigned).
The order in which event sources with the same priority are dispatched is undefined, but the event loop generally tries to dispatch them in the order it learnt about events on them. As the backing kernel primitives do not provide accurate information about the order in which events occurred this is not necessarily reliable. However, it is guaranteed that if events are seen on multiple same-priority event sources at the same time, each one is not dispatched again until all others have been dispatched once. This behavior guarantees that within each priority particular event sources do not starve or dominate the event loop.
The priority of event sources may be changed at any time of their lifetime, with the exception of inotify event sources (i.e. those created with sd_event_add_inotify(3)) whose priority may only be changed in the time between their initial creation and the first subsequent event loop iteration.
sd_event_source_get_priority() may be
    used to query the current priority assigned to the event source
    object source.
On success, sd_event_source_set_priority() and
    sd_event_source_get_priority() return a non-negative integer. On failure, they
    return a negative errno-style error code.
Functions described here are available as a shared
  library, which can be compiled against and linked to with the
  libsystemd pkg-config(1)
  file.
The code described here uses
getenv(3),
which is declared to be not multi-thread-safe. This means that the code calling the functions described
here must not call
setenv(3)
from a parallel thread. It is recommended to only do calls to setenv()
from an early phase of the program when no other threads have been started.
sd_event_source_set_priority() and
    sd_event_source_get_priority() were added in version 229.