From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Feb 21 9:36:49 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5A7BC37B402 for ; Thu, 21 Feb 2002 09:36:47 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) id g1LHaig75132; Thu, 21 Feb 2002 11:36:44 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dan) Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 11:36:43 -0600 From: Dan Nelson To: btt@nethouse.com Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Meaning of process states Message-ID: <20020221173643.GC6875@dan.emsphone.com> References: <20020221172219.GA94921@dev.nethouse.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20020221172219.GA94921@dev.nethouse.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.27i X-OS: FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT X-message-flag: Outlook Error Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In the last episode (Feb 21), btt@nethouse.com said: > Hi, > > Where can I find out what the various process states like: nanslp, > poll, accept, and my favorite: piperd mean? I found this: > > http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=4752744&list=151 > > which mentions that top is showing the sleep/wait channel. > What is a wait channel, and what differentiates one from the other? When a process asks the kernel to do something via a syscall and the kernel can't return control back to the process immediately, it calls tsleep/msleep() to wait for an event to happen. One of the parameters to tsleep is "wmesg", which is just a string describing what you're waiting for. That's what top displays. "nanslp" is a timed delay, "poll" is obvious, "accept" is obvious, and "piperd" means the process is waiting for incoming data on a pipe. If you're bored, you can grep the kernel sources and find all the possible wmesg values. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message