4 ms·
That's very interesting. I didn't know it was possible for a process to use the CPU without using the CPU, as it were. Rather I thought the CPU usage was more
by causi 5y ago
That's very interesting. I didn't know it was possible for a process to use the CPU without using the CPU, as it were. Rather I thought the CPU usage was more or less a direct measurement.
- vnorilo 5y agoFrom [1] On processors that have a halt instruction that stops the CPU until an interrupt occurs, such as x86's HLT instruction, it may save significant amounts of power and heat if the idle task consists of a loop which repeatedly executes HLT instructions. -- I don't know how it is implemented in darwin, HLT is a privileged instruction, then again it's kernel_task. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_(CPU) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_(CPU)
- remram 5y agoI would expect that the CPU frequency would throttle down, rather than regularly running halt instructions.