marking normal sleep identifiers as such.

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:33 AM -0400 6/18/03, Robert Watson wrote:
>On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>
>  > Since thread names are longer than the space we have in ps(1)
>  > output using the thread name is not feasible solution.
>  >
>  > I notice that the interrupt threads all seem to sleep on "-",
>  > and all things considered, I like that.
>  >
>>  Should we adopt that as our convention ?
>
>I agree with the concern -- I've similarly noticed an increase
>in the amount of time I spend diagnosing apparent deadlocks as
>I attempt to determine if kernel threads are simply idle, or
>stuck on locks.  I don't really mind what the convention is;
>"-" is probably as good as any.  Another possible convention
>would be to name the state fooidle -- i.e., pageridle, acpiidle, ...

Long ago and in an operating-system far away (and which is not
running anywhere now), we had a similar problem.  We ended up
adding a mechanism here the sleeper could specify a character
string which would show up in our equivalent of 'ps'.  This
was implemented by having one hardware register which held the
address of the string to display.

Perhaps something similar could be done in freebsd.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu