What are the aio / ata / kmpathd / kjournald / ksoftirqd / migration / watchdog processes mean?

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Issue

  • We are seeing several processes running with these names, between brackets:
root      3545  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [aio/4]
root      3546  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [aio/5]
[...]
root      4671  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [ata/69]
root      4672  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [ata/70]
[...]
root     11219  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [kmpathd/0]
root     11220  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [kmpathd/1]
root     11221  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [kmpathd/2]
[...]
root     11874  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:02:18 [kjournald]
root     11880  2387  0 Sep27 ?        00:01:23 [kjournald]
[...]
root        81     1  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [ksoftirqd/26]
root        82     1  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [watchdog/26]
root        83     1  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [migration/27]
root        84     1  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [ksoftirqd/27]
root        85     1  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [watchdog/27]
root        86     1  0 Sep27 ?        00:00:00 [migration/28]
  • What are these processes doing? Can I kill them?

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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