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Date:      Mon, 11 Sep 2000 14:14:00 +0300
From:      Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Cc:        Valentin Nechayev <netch@segfault.kiev.ua>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: load average is 1 when no processes active; etc.
Message-ID:  <39BCBE78.7D17B24B@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0009112053420.1011-100000@besplex.bde.org>

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Bruce Evans wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Valentin Nechayev wrote:
>
> > > > `top -I' output:
> > > >
> > > > ==={
> > > > last pid:   811;  load averages:  1.01,  0.97,  0.67    up 0+00:16:12  23:26:26
> > >
> > > This is because the idle process is always running (see "ps lax" outout).
> > > Perhaps the bug is that top doesn't show the idle process or other interesting
> > > kernel processes like the new interrupt processes.
> >
> > top does nothing to determine LA except getting sysctl "vm.loadavg", isn't it?
> > ("uptime" and "w" says the same avenrun/LA values.)
> > Imho, idle process should not be determined as always running,
> > and idle process state should be fixed.
>
> Well, the kernel just doesn't treat it specially, so it gets counted in the
> load average.  I'm not sure if the interrupt and other kernel processes
> are counted.  Since they do useful work, they should be.  The idle process
> does the not so useful work of heating the cpu, since it no longer halts
> or runs vm_page_zero_idle().

BTW, will it be fixed any time soon? Mobile users will certainly like to see idle process
halting CPU as it was before.

-Maxim



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