What is the kernel doing?

[Barry Shein]

> I'm curious, I was running umon386 and watching my system when there was
>no activity. I notice that a rawch read causes a process switch. And in turn
>it appears that the pwitch causes a iget, namei and dirblk. I assume the  
>latter are disk access. Why does it do this?

Looks like it's updating the access time for the /dev/ inode associated
with the device. Not sure why it's going thru namei() tho.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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