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'.