hi,

I have seen this process since I upgrade fedora core 12
I need to remove this process.

It doesnt appear in the services list.
Also when I try find the binary:
It appears it may have to do with power management.

I removed this /etc/pm and after reboot it was still present.
I cant find any other [pm] binary


Any thoughts appreciated...

Hello,
process' between brackets usually are kernel threads, so you won't find any binary for it.

The [pm] workqueue is of the Runtime power management framework (runtime power management for I/O devices). If you absolutely don't want it, you'll have the recompile your kernel and remove the PM_RUNTIME option. It was added in kernel 2.6.32.

thanks for the very useful info.
is the modification and rebuild of the kernal a "big" job. have had no need to do it before so not sure what I'm dealing with. is there any other way to disable? I know other FC12 users and the [pm] is not present. thanks.

Removing that option and rebuilding a kernel is a rather easy task but that takes some computation time (you can usually go drink a cup of coffee or two while it's compiling, depending on your hardware specs).
And learning to reconfigure it would be a good way to higher up your linux knowledge. You can certainly find plenty of tutorials on the net for that.

However, the real question here is : do you really *need* to disable runtime power management ? That's no big deal but it saves the planet !

I don't know why other people using FC12 don't have [pm] (maybe you don't have the same kernel version for some reason ? Maybe a different architecture) but it's a feature added for the good's sake. There's no problem having it, and it certainly won't affect performances at your level, it saves power, battery time and money.
So, if I were you, unless you have a really good reason to remove it, I won't take the "pain" to remove it.

s/are/usually are/

However, I agree - why do you "need" to remove this ?.

basically I need to remove because I have another process with the same name (which wont run cos it detects this kernal pm running). and I cant change the name of the legacy process (from pm to something else). thats the basic reason for wanting to remove. I appreciate the feedback.

what other process do you want to start (I hope I didn't misread it somewhere)...?

the legacy binary I have is called pm also and it has to be a single instance. therefore the legacy binary checks to see if pm is running and of course it picks up the kernal pm thread and the pid associated with. unfortunately I cannot change the nature of legacy pm bin.

Oh dear God! The author of that binary should be hunted down and SHOT! You have my sympathy.

If you don't have access to the source then how about renaming your legacy binary to PM, and then using something like an hex-editor to hack the executable and change the process name it's checking against to match the new name (if necessary).

It's ugly but it might be the easiest option.

I agree with GazL.
I long to know what is that binary that have such a bad method of singleton check.
It would be a pain to have to recompile your kernel with each new version. The guilty binary has to be fixed.