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In computer science and software engineering, busy-waiting, busy-looping or spinning is a technique in which a process repeatedly checks to see if a condition is true, such as whether keyboard input or a lock is available. Spinning can also be used to generate an arbitrary time delay, a technique that was necessary on systems that lacked a ...
Modern interactive computers require that the computer constantly be monitoring for user input or device activity, so at some fundamental level there is an infinite processing idle loop that must continue until the device is turned off or reset.
Input queues are mainly used in Operating System Scheduling which is a technique for distributing resources among processes. Input queues not only apply to operating systems (OS), but may also be applied to scheduling inside networking devices. The purpose of scheduling is to ensure resources are being distributed fairly and effectively ...
A progress indicator is an element of a command-line interface, a textual user interface, or a graphical user interface that is intended to inform the user that an operation is in progress, to reassure that the system is not hung or waiting for user input, and often to provide the user with an estimate of how far through a task the system has progressed.
When a program makes many I/O operations (such as a program mainly or largely dependent on user input), this means that the processor can spend almost all of its time idle waiting for I/O operations to complete. Alternatively, it is possible to start the communication and then perform processing that does not require that the I/O be completed.
Multitasking is a common feature of computer operating systems since at least the 1960s. It allows more efficient use of the computer hardware; when a program is waiting for some external event such as a user input or an input/output transfer with a
The context switch loads the process into the processor and changes the state to "running" while the previously "running" process is stored in a "waiting" state. If a process in the "running" state needs to wait for a resource (wait for user input or file to open, for example), it is assigned the "blocked" state.
An uninterruptible sleep state is a sleep state that will not handle a signal right away. It will wake only as a result of a waited-upon resource becoming available or after a time-out occurs during that wait (if specified when put to sleep). It is mostly used by device drivers waiting for disk or network IO (input/output).