[TriLUG] kscand?

[Gregory Woodbury]

"It was written once upon a time (by Jeremy Portzer):"
> 
> On Sat, 2003-06-07 at 15:17, Jeff Bollinger wrote:
> > Hello all, quick question about a RedHat 7.2 system (2.4.20-13.7 Kernel).
> > I tried searching Redhat.com, Google, the TriLUG archives, as well as the
> > man pages and `apropos`, but could not find any information about a
> > process that I have running called "kscand".  Can anyone explain what this
> > is/does?
> > 
> > # ps -eaf |grep kscand
> > root         6     1  0 May22 ?        00:43:39 [kscand]
> > 
> > While I'm asking, what do processes contained in square brackets mean
> > also?  Some processes appear in these brackets when I run `ps`.
> > 
> 
> The square brackets and the "k" prefix to the name indicate that it's a
> function of the kernel.  Note that the process ID is very low (#6) as
> this "process" is started immediately after the kernel boots.  There's
> also keventd, kswapd, bdflush, kjournald, etc.  I'm not a kernel hacker
> at all so I've got no idea why some kernel functions appear as
> "processes" like this but it's nothing to worry about.

They are "threads" in the kernel context.

-- 
Gregory G. "Wolfe" Woodbury   `-_-'         Owner/Admin: wolves.durham.nc.us
ggw at wolves.durham.nc.us      U
"The Line Eater is a               Hug your wolf.
 Boojum Snark"