Strange process: md

Support & Help Requests
1

Hello,
I’ve noticed a strange process while taking a look at the MATE system monitor. The process in question is this one called md:
process

As you can see, it has a very strange icon. Here’s the process information:

$ ps -Flww -p 49
F S UID        PID  PPID  C PRI  NI ADDR SZ WCHAN    RSS PSR STIME TTY          TIME CMD
1 I root        49     2  0  60 -20 -     0 -          0   1 13:37 ?        00:00:00 [md]

I’ve seen in the Ubuntu forums that the process could be a miner, but in this case the process is not using any CPU. Maybe because I have the firewall enabled.

Apart from the icon, I also find it strange that the process is not displayed in pstree:

$ pstree | grep "md"
systemd-+-ModemManager---2*[{ModemManager}]
        |-systemd-+-(sd-pam)
        |-systemd-journal
        |-systemd-logind
        |-systemd-resolve
        |-systemd-timesyn---{systemd-timesyn}
        |-systemd-udevd

What is this process? Has a miner been installed in my system?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: I’m using Ubuntu MATE 18.04.1 LTS 64 bits

2

I think it is somehow kernel related, like kthreadd, loop, kworker and others shown in square brackets by ps xau .

Sure enough, in htop it and those others disappear when I select “hide kernel threads”.

That icon is probably a bug, though - in 16.04 it has a standard gear icon.

3

Oh right. I forgot about ps:

$ ps axu | grep "md"
root        42  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        SN   13:37   0:00 [ksmd]
root        49  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        I<   13:37   0:00 [md]

But my concern was mainly caused by the icon shown in the system monitor. sh also shows a strange icon, so maybe they are being assigned for some reason by the system monitor:
sh-process-icon

Does this mean it’s a false alarm?

4

I know what’s going on, those icons are all flags of countries which have the TLD .md , .sh, etc.
So yes, false alarm and some really weird icon matching algorithm at work here.

3 Likes
5

Weird. But at least that explains the flags icons.

Thank you very much, @maximuscore !