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I'm running Ubuntu 10.10:

uname -a
Linux mt-xps 2.6.35-22-generic #35-Ubuntu SMP Sat Oct 16 20:45:36 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

When I run top, I occasionally see a "kslowd000" or similar process popping up in the top CPU usage list. I've tried googling kslowd, but found no explanation to what it is. manpages also don't help.

What does it do ? And how would I find out myself ?

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2 Answers 2

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It's a kernel thread performing things that typically take a lot of time. For more information, see slow-work.txt.

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  • Thanks. Is there some sort of manpage or other lookup mechanism for this, or do you have to know/guess/google which daemon name is connected to which feature, and part of the Kernel or another program ?
    – Martin T.
    Nov 2, 2010 at 15:48
  • Guess, Google or just plain know. :-) OK, there are books and so on written about kernel, but they are usually very hard to read and understand. Kernel internals is not the easiest thing on Earth ...
    – Janne Pikkarainen
    Nov 2, 2010 at 16:57
  • That's kinda disappointing, really. There's usually a lot of info for first-time users via the graphical help, and there's mind-numbing technical detail via man pages etc. But to find out concepts and which thing (program/daemon/folder/abbreviation) belongs to which other, you have to guess or ask dumb-sounding questions.
    – Martin T.
    Nov 3, 2010 at 9:01
  • Yeah. There are various sites such as kernelnewbies.org easing your journey into kernel internals, but for bigger picture the documentation lacks in many cases.
    – Janne Pikkarainen
    Nov 3, 2010 at 10:19
  • One hint - "processes" that are listed in ps output with square brackets: [kslowd000] are usually (always?) kernel threads.
    – Dan Pritts
    Apr 29, 2013 at 21:01
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To debug kslowd, you'll need to enable debugging in the kernel (and recompile is necessary) by adding to your kernel config:

CONFIG_SLOW_WORK_DEBUG=y

Reboot, then run

watch -n0 cat /sys/kernel/debug/slow_work/runqueue

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