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Subject"busy" load counters
Currently, tools like "top" show stats like

Cpu(s): 92.1% user, 6.9% system, 0.0% nice, 1.0% idle

Unfortunately, these stats are not sufficient to determine wether the
system is "busy". Determining wether the system is "busy" is very useful
in case an interactive application (e.g. a shell or some shell command)
does not respond.
Maybe it just hangs (waits for input) or does serious work (e.g. uses
the CPU or accesses the disk). Disk access is not visible in "top".
Depending on the machine, on disk accesses, there might be a slight or
significant rise in the "system" portion of those stats, but this is not
trustable.

I'd like a new stat "busy", which simply is one minus the time, when the
system is idle but does _not_ have outstanding IO requests. Users may
judge from this stat, wether their application waits for input or just
needs some time. This way, they know better what to do when they get
impatient, and they now it faster. (Yes, they can know it by looking up
all processes of their application, strace them and check wether the
actions observed involve just waiting and polling or maybe IO. But this
is very tedious.)

How do you think about this? Would kernel hackers oppose such a
"feature" for any reason?

Xuân.


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