Re: System Idle Process

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According to TaskManager, this process uses some memory (seem to be
always 28k)and owns two threads

At this point it is already obvious that your machine has 2 CPUs.....

When CPU has no threads to dispatch, it dispatches its idle thread.
Every CPU has its own idle thread. Collection of idle threads is known
as "Idle Process". In fact, "System Idle Process" is just its name in
the Task Manager - it's internal name is just "System". Therefore, we
have 2 processes named "System" - one of them dispatches idle threads,
and another one dispatches all system worker threads . It is
understandable that these processes do not have their user-mode
representation. Therefore, you cannot open their handles with
OpenProcess()


Anton Bassov


Günter Prossliner wrote:
Hello!

First of all: This question I am asking not because I have a specific
problem, but purely because I want to know it.

The question is: What is the story behind the mystical "System Idle Process"
(PID:0)? According to TaskManager, this process uses some memory (seem to be
always 28k)and owns two threads. It is not possible to attach a debugger to
the process. I was not able to get a ProcessHandle via OpenProcess(0).

Can you tell me something about this?



GP

.

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