>> However, your statement of "idle with no major activity" makes me
>> think you're not expecting to see any...
> Acroread under the linux emulator on the i386 port will bump the load
> average by 1.  Interestingly acroread also uses 0.01 seconds of cpu /
> 2 seconds when idle.  The latter is observable with "watch ps -xl".

I've seen this sort of behavior often enough myself, and it's not
hardware-specific.  Try the following program as an example.

#include <signal.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/sysctl.h>

static void handler(int sig __attribute__((__unused__)))
{
}

int main(void);
int main(void)
{
 struct clockinfo ci;
 int cilen;
 int mib[2];
 struct itimerval itv;

 signal(SIGALRM,handler);
 mib[0] = CTL_KERN;
 mib[1] = KERN_CLOCKRATE;
 cilen = sizeof(ci);
 sysctl(&mib[0],2,&ci,&cilen,0,0);
 itv.it_value.tv_sec = ci.tick / 1000000;
 itv.it_value.tv_usec = ci.tick % 1000000;
 itv.it_interval = itv.it_value;
 setitimer(ITIMER_REAL,&itv,0);
 while (1) sigpause(0);
}

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