[Bradford] what is [bioset] ?

[David Spencer]

> Can anyone tell what a process calling itself [bioset] is. I have a couple
> dozen of them running as root and can do nothing about them. My distro's
> forums say that they are a kernel process and are involved in mounting
> certain kinds of  encrypted file.
> Does anyone know any better?

Kernel threads; not, strictly speaking, processes.
There is, supposedly, one for each block device.
'bio' = block i/o

They aren't *specifically* related to mounting certain kinds of
encrypted file. Basically, everything disky-wisky will entail block
i/o. Look for everything under /dev that starts with a 'b' in 'ls -l'.
Threads for each of them will come and go... well, not so much of the
go, apparently, but still.  You definitely want to "do nothing about
them" even if you could choose to do something -- which you can't.

This recent innovation (stuff got refactored a bit) is not
particularly pretty, but neither were all those other theads like
'[kworker/...]' and we've sort-of got used to those by now. Cheer up,
in another ten years you won't notice them; by then, either the block
layer code will have got refactored a few more times, or there will be
hundreds more ruddy threads burying them.

Tarra
-D.