busy-wait vi. 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 `spinlocks'.


see also:
spin hog 

busy-wait
     
         to wait for an event by spinning through a
        tight loop 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.  this is a
        wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems
        where a busy-waiting program may hog the processor.
     
        jargon file
     
        1999-06-10
     
     
see also:
event spinning tight loop polls interrupt handler time-sharing 
hog jargon file