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 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.

