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 {spin}ning
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 timesharing 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 spinlocks.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {block}{hot spot}{spin}]