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

[Kris Kennaway]

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.

Kris
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