Re: Change top's notion of idle processes / threads

On 25 May 2014 03:11, Kubilay Kocak <koobs_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 24/05/2014 7:22 AM, Allan Jude wrote:
>
>> I think this makes good sense. I would definitely prefer it. Would it
>> make sense to maybe preserve the old behaviour behind a command line flag?
>>
>
> And an update to top(8) reflecting the algo :)I know these little
> esoteric things could always do with more obvious breadcrumbs (like load
> average calcs, etc) for our future selves and others.
>
> +1 on the behavior change, not sure about retaining the old under a
> flag. Who might benefit from it? How do other OS top implementations
> calculate their idle? If there's other examples out there with the same
> (current) algo, then retaining compat might be worth it, such as for
> newly converted users

The change in the patch is good, the new behaviour is much more
usable.  Note that we don't currently define "idle" in top(8); for
this change maybe we should just state that non-idle processes may
report 0% CPU due to rounding.

A flag for the old behaviour seems like a bad idea.  We already have
an adequate supply of knobs and modes and options that don't provide
real value, and just add work for our users to determine if they
should be set or not.

-Ed