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These applications have recently shown up in my processes list (via top), and I can't kill them. They're taking up a huge load of CPU and are making my fan go crazy.

What's up with this?

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Dani AI

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saw an unexpected dd process and already flagged klogd; the useful next step is a concise forensic workflow to identify what launched that dd and whether it is safe to interrupt it.

Start by capturing the PID from top and inspecting the process tree and invocation with ps -o pid,ppid,stat,cmd -p <pid> and pstree -ps <pid>. The proc filesystem holds definitive clues: check /proc/<pid>/cmdline, /proc/<pid>/exe and /proc/<pid>/fd to see the exact command, binary path and any open devices or files (proc(5) documents the layout) [https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html].

To confirm activity and impact, list open files with lsof -p <pid> and watch I/O with iotop -oPa (shows which processes are doing actual disk I/O). Attaching strace -p <pid> -s 200 -f reveals system calls in flight and can show whether the process is stuck reading/writing or repeatedly failing. For I/O-heavy cases use iotop as the primary proof of cause (iotop project) [].

If the process must be tamed while investigating, lower its priority with renice -n 19 -p <pid> and ionice -c3 -p <pid> to reduce system impact. Processes in uninterruptible sleep (state "D") cannot be killed until the kernel I/O completes; check dmesg -w or kernel logs for repeating hardware or driver errors that could explain a stuck process. The klogd daemon behavior is tied to kernel message volume, so a burst of kernel errors will drive klogd CPU use (see klogd(8)) [].

If termination is required, prefer orderly shutdown of the service or script that launched the process, then send SIGTERM and SIGINT before SIGKILL; abruptly killing a process actively writing a block device can leave on-disk state inconsistent.

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Member Avatar for John A

klogd is your kernel logger daemon, so you can't kill it. dd is a raw data copying utility. It shouldn't be in your processes unless you're formatting a partition or something.

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dd is a process and I am not formatting anything. klogd isn't much of an issue now, and neither is dd , it was just a surprise to see dd in there.

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