process states revisited

[Greg Albrecht]

while searching for 'freebsd process states' on google i came across
this thread:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2006-December/138024.html
i'm a new subscriber, so i can't reply to the original thread.

i'm guessing fr0zen at sbcglobal.net's original question was something more like:
"that do the values in the STATE column in top mean?" here's an
example of what i'm talking about:

## bad 'top' formatting to come
  PID USERNAME      PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
95698 mysql          20    0   388M   349M kserel 0 266.7H  0.63%  0.63% mysqld
98237 jffnms          8    0 21224K 14412K nanslp 0   0:02  0.59%  0.59% php
98239 jffnms         96    0 22124K 15292K select 1   0:02  0.49%  0.49% php
98596 root           96    0  4124K  2560K CPU1   1   0:00  0.51%  0.05% top
 1263 root            4    0  1408K   708K accept 0   0:07  0.00%  0.00% vsftpd
 3405 galbrecht       8    0  4876K  2676K wait   0   0:00  0.00%  0.00% bash
94414 root            4    0  3284K  1968K sbwait 1   0:00  0.00%  0.00% mysql
## end of bad formatting

this snippet of top shows the following values for STATE: kserel,
nanslp, select, CPU1, accept, wait, sbwait

this thread has already cleared up these states:
nanslp: "Waiting for < 1 second." -grog at freebsd.org
select: "Waiting for a select() to complete" -grog at freebsd.org
wait:  "Waiting for something to happen, possibly time limited (>= 1
second)" -grog at fbsd

top(1) tells us: "STATE is the current state (one of "sleep", "WAIT",
"run", "idl", "zomb", or  "stop")"

eh, not so much.

man clears up some of these states:
sleep: "The sleep command suspends execution for a minimum of
seconds." - sleep(1)
accept: "accept a connection on a socket" - accept(2)

i bet i can answer with:
run: process is running?
zomb: zombie process, terminated but not removed from memory

that leaves us with:
kserel?
sbwait?
idl?
stop?

does the previous answer still apply ("ask the developers of those programs")?

-g

-- 
Greg Albrecht (gregoryba at gmail.com)
An Indie, Hip Hop and IDM Podcast: The Letter G
http://theletterg.org