Description of problem: I read the top man page in the hope of finding more about the meaning of the entries in the cpu status line in the summary area. For example, Cpu(s): 2.0%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.7%si, 0.0%st But 'man top' does not reveal what these entries stand for or what they mean. Also, searching the net reveals cpu lines like CPU states: 5.1% user 1.1% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 93.6% idle Either these are older versions of top with less entries in the CPU lines and so more space to show the whole word, or there is an undocumented switch for verbosity somewhere. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 3.2.7-12.fc6 Steps to Reproduce: 1. man top 2. read 3. frown Expected results 1. A more verbose explanation of the two-letter entries in the cpu line of the summary area. 2. Either a discussion of what these entries mean or a pointer to relevant documentation.
These values are taken from /proc/stat. There were originally only four of them on kernel 2.4, now there are eight, therefore the mysterious acronymes that indeed should be explained somewhere, especially when "man proc" gives an incomplete answer. FYI: the columns are times spent in: user mode system mode low priority user mode (nice) idle task iowait hard irq (time servicing irqs) soft irq (time servicing soft irqs) steal (time given to other DomU instances (virtual machines)) I'll try to put it into the manpage somewhere.
Changed version to rawhide (FC6 is EOLed).
Seems this bug still exists in fedora 8.