DMA is essentially the AVOIDANCE of using the CPU for I/O. The CPU makes a few calls to the chipset (in the case of ATA DMA), and the rest happens around the processor, not threw it.
Jason > > It's described in the vmstat man page. You're supposed to be clairvoyant > about > these things and know that virtual memory stats is where cpu time is > described. :) > > It's "Time spent waiting for IO." The cpu can't do anything until IO is > completed - typically this is some kind of DMA transfer. > -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
