= B =
Used of human behavior, conveys that the
subject is busy waiting for someone or something, intends to move
instantly as soon as it shows up, and thus cannot do anything else
at the moment. "Can't talk now, I'm busy-waiting till Bill gets
off the phone."
Technically, `busy-wait' means to wait on an event by
spinning through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for
the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt
handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. In
applications this is a wasteful technique, and best avoided on
time-sharing systems where a busy-waiting program may hog the
processor. However, it is often unavoidable in kernel programming.
In the Linux world, kernel busy-waits are usually referred to as
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.