Process States Explanation

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Monday, 18 December 2006 at  1:06:13 -0600, Fr0zen wrote:
>
> Where can I get a good list of what each process state means?

That depends on what you mean by process state.  The real definition
is in /usr/include/sys/proc.h, but there are now only three states:

	enum {
		PRS_NEW = 0,		/* In creation */
		PRS_NORMAL,		/* threads can be run. */
		PRS_ZOMBIE
	} p_state;			/* (j/c) S* process status. */

Maybe you mean the thread state, also described in the same file, but
I doubt it.

There are two other possibilities:

- The information reported by ps(1) in the STAT column.  This is
  described, not surprisingly, in the man page ps(1).

- The information reported by ps(1) in the MWCHAN column.  This is a
  name passed by a part of the kernel when it sleeps, so any process
  with a value in MWCHAN is sleeping.  The names are frequently
  associated with the name of the function doing the sleeping.  In
  general, you need to understand the kernel code to make a lot of
  sense of them.  Still, if you do a 'ps al' you'll see a number of
  names again and again:

  ttyin	          Waiting for character input
  select	  Waiting for a select() to complete
  wait		  Waiting for something to happen, possibly time
                  limited (>= 1 second)
  nanslp	  Waiting for < 1 second.

Maybe we should write up some of these.

Greg
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