CMD in ps command in linux

Question

Under CMD, I was wondering what the /1 or /2 ... are? What do they indicate? I couldnt find it in the man page. In general, does anyone have a good understanding of the CMD column that they could share?

Answer 1

Do you mean when you run ps -e -o cmd, you can see entries like:

[kthreadd]
[ksoftirqd/0]
[migration/0]
[watchdog/0]
[events/0]

They are called "kernel threads". Anything with [] around it is a kernel thread.

/0 means it is running on the first CPU, /1 means it is running on the second CPU, etc.

For more information, see:

• Linux Magazine - Kernel Threads
• Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love, second edition, page 35

Answer 2

They represent the core that the given kernel thread is bound to.