What is Kworker in ubuntu and what it does?

[Eun]

When I run top, I got to see something listed which is called “kworker”. I cannot see any documentation for that. I also tried to search on google also but it didn’t helped me. The oddest thing that I can see about it is, it always get listed in top 10 consumer of resources when I run top, but I cannot see it using any of the resources. If anyone has any idea about this then please reply with what is it for and what it really does. If there is any documentation about it then please post its link. I eagerly want to know about this “kworker” thing.

[ISHANIL]

I also want some information about “kworker” so if anyone has any knowledge about then please share it with us. It is true that there is not so much info about it on the web. As a last option, I even tried Wikipedia and Bing, but nothing helped me.

[Abhi-Shake]

I am having many issues with this “kworker” thing. For a moment it consumes nearly half of my CPU and other resources. It also seems that it is affecting my USB ports, because, kworker goes into hyper drive every time when I plug in an USB drive, and this leaves me unable to work. Till now I have not found any reasonable explanation about kworker, as what is it and why it is hogging so much CPU. So, anyone who has enough information about kworker then please provide me those informations so that I can figure out what should I do.

[Eesvaramma]

Recently I upgraded to Kubuntu Natty Beta 1. And I am also facing several problems because of kworker only. However, I was not sure that the reason behind those issue is Kubuntu only. But I am also experiencing that it is consuming a very big portion my computer’s resources. So I will also like if anyone provides any information about it.

[DanielV]

Once I was also having issues with this. When I wakeup my computer or if I plug any usb disk then my computer used to drastically decelerate. The process “kworker” was taking most of the part of CPU and there for it was freezing after some interval of time. I read many solutions from different forums but none of them worked. Then I went into my laptop’s bios settings and there I saw that Hand XCHI OFF: Enabled. I just disabled it and since then I am not able to see that my laptop is even freezing.

[Enriquee]

Here I have some information about “Kworker” so I will like to share it with all of you. Kworker is a process which gearshifts the ACPI wakeup signals directly from BIOS. Kernels had issues due to too many wakeups. This issue is seen in almost all the latest Linux distributions I hope that it will get fixed in kernel 2.6.35. I hope this information will be helpful to you.

[Deep123]

Here, I have some more information about “kworker”. It is nothing but a placeholder process for kernel worker threads. The largest part of the actual processing for the kernel is performed by “kworker”, and particularly in the case, where there are timers, input/output, interrupts, etc. And they normally keep up a correspondence to the greater part of any allocated “system” time to run processes. And also, it cannot be removed easily from the system.

[bOReANaZ!]

I have no kubuntu programs installed, and then also I can see that kworker is running and it is causative to the wakeups by 12%. Now I also think it is related to kernel and as its name is kworker, I think k stands for kernel. And that is the reason why kworker also keeps running on ubuntu machine.

[Zhankana_n]

If your system is freezing or doing unusual things because of kworker’s activities then you should try these things. If you are not doing anything then shut down all the long running services or timers. And if this doesn’t works then simply restart your computer. When you computer is rebooting then try to turnoff those hardware which is not used by you currently, if your system allows you to disable hardware in a pre-boot environment. And if you are still getting problems every time you start your PC and before you do anything on your PC, then try uninstalling several programs and this time you should run syscall profiling tools so that you can track down those specific programs which seem to be causing these problems.
If all the above solution doesn’t helps you then you will have to wait for the future kernel upgrade, probably they will not have these issues with them.