ksoftirqd9

Overview

ksoftirqd is a per-cpu kernel thread that runs when the machine is under heavy soft-interrupt load. Soft interrupts are normally serviced on return from a hard interrupt, but it's possible for soft interrupts to be triggered more quickly than they can be serviced. If a soft interrupt is triggered for a second time while soft interrupts are being handled, the ksoftirq daemon is triggered to handle the soft interrupts in process context. If ksoftirqd is taking more than a tiny percentage of CPU time, this indicates the machine is under heavy soft interrupt load.