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Re: funny idle time from time



On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 02:37:17PM +1000, Brian May wrote:

> Top says on an completely idle system (well.. should be almost
> completely idle):
> [...]
> CPU states:   0.2% user,  57.4% system,   0.8% nice,  41.6% idle
> [...]
>   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
>     3 root      19   0     0    0     0 SW   56.9  0.0   4:39 kapm-idled
> [...]
> I could make a few guesses at what is going on here (probably related to
> the kapm-idled task, too), but first question: How does top calculate the
> idle time?

Idle time is time in which the CPU is not executing any instructions.
kapm-idled executes HLT instructions to save power, so this time is not
strictly idle, though it is time in which no user process or other kernel
process is executing.

-- 
 - mdz



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