How to get rid of unused jfsCommit processes?

On a Dell Poweredge T620 with Xeon hexacore processor, i notice that there are 14 extraneous processes for the jfs filesystem. On another server, there are similar processes for the xfs filesystem as well.

Though they don't cause any problem or significant load, i would like to get rid of these processes since i use neither jfs nor xfs.

Here are the relevant parts of the ps ax output:

31611 ?        S      0:00 [jfsIO]
31612 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31613 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31614 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31615 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31616 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31617 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31618 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31619 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31620 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31621 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31622 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31623 ?        S      0:00 [jfsCommit]
31624 ?        S      0:00 [jfsSync]

>uname -a 
Linux ada 2.6.32-41-server #89-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 27 22:33:31 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Solution 1:

Even if you are not using JFS/XFS, these kernel processes exist if the JFS/XFS kernel modules are loaded. Assuming you're using a recent stock kernel, these kernel modules are .ko modules, so to prevent them from loading all you need to do is blacklist jfs and xfs inside /etc/modprobe.d

If you are using a kernel that has these modules built-in, the only way to remove them is at runtime with an rmmod or modprobe -r -- in that case, those would have to go into a startup script.

To find out whether yours are modular or built-in, just do a sudo updatedb and locate jfs.ko, locate xfs.ko. If results in the /lib/modules/ directory are returned, they are modular; otherwise, they're built-in.

Could you edit the question with the output of uname -a?