Re: silent PC vs. emacs

[Richard Stallman]

    so there is some activity all the time. Is this something that can be
    avoided?

You need to find out what's doing it.  I suspect that those system
calls are related to timers, but that's all we can tell from them.

Using breakpoints you could see if this really is running a timer, and
you could see what timer functions are being called.  Then we would
know the relevant facts, rather than just guessing (which is very
inefficient).

strace is a very inarticulate way of describing what a program is
doing.  It was invented for examining the functioning of programs for
which the user does not have source code, and I am surprised that so many
GNU/Linux users turn to that rather than to GDB.