On 5.1, what is the process named "idle"?

[Joe Altman]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 05:50:01PM -0700, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 09:39:51AM +0900, Till Plewe wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 08:04:05PM -0400, Joe Altman wrote:
> > > Greetings, list subsribers...
> > > 
> > > I've installed 5.1 and a variety of apps on a machine, in preparation
> > > for a move to 5.1 in the near future, and in the course of playing
> > > around on it, I've noticed a process called idle:
> > > 
> > 
> > ...
> > 
> > > What is idle? 
> > 
> > IDLE - an Integrated DeveLopment Environment for Python
> > (see www.python.org)
> 
> Heh..no.
> 
> The idle task is the kernel thread that runs when the kernel is not
> doing anything else more meaningful like running user processes or
> servicing I/O.  It takes care of running some low-priority tasks like
> pre-zeroing memory pages in preparation for future demand.

So, should it be in a constant state of RUN, and consume more than 90%
of CPU and WCPU for more than twenty four hours? I suspect that I
still do not entirely grok the subtle meaning of the fields CPU and
WCPU...it's just that when I see this type of thing on a set of
userhosts I frequent, it often results in me or someone else yelling
over the wall to the SysAdmin: "Hey, $USERS older-than-dirt perl
process is chewing up CPU and bogging down the host...please kill the
process!" But I don't notice any stickiness on my machine...so maybe
it's no problem.

I've taken another look at this, and just noticed that there are tasks
with NICE ranging from 52 to -187 in 'top -SU root'...I'm not freaked
out by this, but note that I read the man page which indicates that
possible values range from 20 to -20.

The version runs sweetly, btw; no problems at all. Music, scanning,
updates, all that...very smooth.

Thanks for the answers,

fj