For the 3rd time in 2 months, this has happened...
Two processes pop up in my process list (in System Activity, Ctrl+Esc). They have no name, or command string. Their owner is "root, -1" (no other processes running have "-1" in their user string). Their CPU usage is reported as "unknown". I can't kill them, because they are constantly going away, and popping back up (which effectively revives them, and changes their PID). In the coming up/going away shuffle, sometimes System Activity will report 3 process being there (but it's almost always 2).
I have a dual core, so when a program maxes out the CPU, it'll only use one core, which is nice when things misbehave. But my CPU usage widgets are showing that these processes are consistently using about 3/4 of both cores at the same time. (Makes sense, right? 2 processes, 2 cores)
This goes on for about 5 minutes then stops. And there seems to be no apparent reason why this happens, I can't think of anything that I do that might trigger it. The first time it happened was not to soon after I installed my OS, so the first time could've been triggered by that (if it's nice), or by the installation of a bad package (if it's not nice).
This is so un-Linux-like, which makes me that much more uneasy about it.
Anyone have any idea what could be going on? Or how to get more information about how certain processes came about?
Thanks,
Yarin