Blocking Process: Difference between revisions

A blocking process is usually waiting for an event such as a semaphore being released or a message arriving in its message queue. In multitasking systems, such processes are expected to notify the scheduler with a system call that it is to wait, so that they can be removed from the active scheduling queue until the event occurs. A process that continues to run while waiting (i.e., continuously polling for the event in a tight loop) is said to be [[Busy-Wait|busy-waiting]], which is undesireableundesirable as it wastes clock cycles which could be used for other processes.