Launching a real-time thread with higher priority than main

My application needs a main thread for the user interface and a real-time thread
to monitor some analog inputs.  So this is what I did, based on the article
found here:

  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ipc2lin1.html


//..in the main thread:

    pthread_attr_t threadAttr;
    struct sched_param param;
  pthread_attr_init(&threadAttr);
  pthread_attr_setstacksize(&threadAttr, 32768);
  pthread_attr_setdetachstate(&threadAttr, PTHREAD_CREATE_DETACHED);
  pthread_create(&worker,&threadAttr,&worker_function,NULL);
  pthread_attr_destroy(&threadAttr);


//..Then, in the worker_function:

    struct sched_param param;
    int policy;
    pthread_t thread_id = pthread_self();
  pthread_getschedparam(thread_id, &policy, &param);

  printf("existing policy=%1d, priority=%1d\r\n",
      policy,param.sched_priority);
//..This yields policy=SCHED_OTHER, priority=0..

  policy = SCHED_RR;
  param.sched_priority = 90;
  pthread_setschedparam(thread_id, policy, &param);

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This all seems to work fine.  But I don't know why the article suggested 90 for
the priority.  And I don't know why SCHED_RR (which I assume stands for
round-robin) is the proper policy for my worker thread.  I don't need
exceptionally high priority for my worker thread.  I just need it to be
sllightly higher than my main thread.  So should I do a getschedparam on the
main thread and just add 1 for the worker priority?

Robert Scott
Ypsilanti, Michigan