[TriLUG] kscand?

[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.

--Jeremy