Comment 80 for bug 1518457

Alexander,

please note that if a kernel process name contains "swap" as a substring, it does not immediately mean that this process exclusively does process memory swap-in/swap-out. kswapd is a kernel process name for an important piece of memory management subsystem: it frees pages by flushing them to disk or discarding when the system is low on memory, saving you the trouble of OOMs. This includes both buffer cache and process memory; however, disk buffers are freed first.

Generally that means that on a system with disabled swap you _will_ see high cpu% in kswapd when you have almost no memory and buffers have not been synced to disk yet. This is not a bug (but you should consider installng more memory or having a stricter sync policy).

However, this discussion is very off topic, since this bug is not an intended behavior.