Sometimes, looking at the list of processes using the top, htop or ps utility, you may find the kworker process there. This process can take up a lot

What is the kworker process in Linux

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2020-07-02 18:08:26

Sometimes, looking at the list of processes using the top, htop or ps utility, you may find the kworker process there. This process can take up a lot of processor and memory resources, but you just won’t be able to kill it, the system will not allow it. In today's article, we will understand what kind of kworker Linux process is, why it is needed, and how to cope with the high resource consumption of this process.

The fact is that kworker is a process that integrates all the processes running in the Linux kernel. High CPU utilization by this process means that the kernel is doing some work. 

Kworker is responsible for all operations that are performed at the kernel level. These are various timers, interrupts, input / output operations and so on. There can be several such processes for several processor cores. For example: kworker: 0, kworker: 1, and so on. You can see what processes are there now and how many resources they consume using top, which must be run on behalf of the superuser:

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