Strange process running under Linux - Mandrake 8.1

[sunde]

I am a new user to Linuz in general and I appear to have a stranger process with PID: 4
running.. Now, the strange thing is that it consumes from 60% to 90% :confused: of my cpu cycles all the time.. I cannot kill the process even as root.. The name of this silly little process is (kapm - idled)

Has anyone had this problem? Really need to know what the heck this is. :(

[slacker_x]

I don't really know the terminology, but that is a kernel process. You can't kill it. From the name of it, it sounds like a power management thing in your kernel. I don't know if what you are seeing is actually a problem though.

[Joeri Sebrechts]

Never take the statistics you get about kernel processes serious, since they're not real processes (linux is a monolithic kernel)

[Malakin]

This is a process that sends idle instructions (or whatever they're called) to the cpu when it's not doing anything. This is supposed to reduce power usage.

This is normal, even in windows the task manager has a "system idle process" which does the same thing.