List of Administrator Processes
From Mac Guides
This article lists the processes owned by "root", and visible from the Activity Monitor with "Administrator Processes" selected. When available, further information for each process is presented.
(If you have additional information, please add it to this list)
| Process | Description (if available) |
|---|---|
| automount | Listens for external media to be inserted, such as CD Roms. |
| blued | Bluetooth |
| configd | Responsible for different aspects of local configuration, mostly networking. |
| coreaudiod | "coreaudiod is a mach_init.d daemon used for CoreAudio related purposes. This daemon hosts the SystemSoundServer and is used as the Master process for HAL device management. coreaudiod was introduced with OSX version 10.4." - (coreaudiod manual page) |
| coreservicesd | |
| crashreporterd | Detects application crashes and logs information about them to the Console. |
| cupsd | An open source printing service. |
| DirectoryService | "This process acts as a central clearinghouse for "Directory" information -- mainly users/groups/authentication, and service location (e.g. file servers, printers, etc). It gathers information from a variety of plugins (NetInfo, LDAP, Active Directory, NIS, Bonjour/Rendesvous/, AppleTalk, SMB) and hands it out to whatever program requested it." Source |
| diskarbitrationd | disk arbitration daemon, "diskarbitrationd listens for connections from clients, notifies clients of the appearance of disks and filesystems, and governs the mounting of filesystems and the claiming of disks amongst clients." - (diskarbitrationd manual page) |
| distnoted | Provides distributed notification services. |
| dynamic_pager | Manages swapping memory pages in/out. |
| httpd | The Apache web server. |
| IIDCAssistant | |
| kernel_task | The grand daddy of everything going on. |
| KernelEventAgent | "Handles notifications about file system status (e.g. "A server you are using is no longer available. Do you want to continue trying to contact it?" and "Your startup disk is almost full. You need to make more space available on your startup disk by deleting files.") " Source |
| kextd | Handles requests to load kernel extensions (kexts). |
| launchd | Introduced in Tiger, it is responsible for booting the system and managing other daemons. It replaces init, rc, the init.d and rc.d scripts, SystemStarter, inetd, xinetd, atd, crond and watchdogd, which were used in previous versions of Mac OS X (as a result, booting is now much faster). |
| lookupd | A DNS service. Looks up and caches DNS results (URL to IP address translation). |
| mDNSResponder | Provides service discovery for Bonjour. |
| mds | Spotlight, stands for "Meta Data Service". |
| memberd | group membership resolution daemon, "memberd is a daemon process used by the system to resolve group memberships. It should always be running and responds to messages from the kernel or other processes using membership API calls. All resolution is done using Open Directory calls for both legacy and new group formats, including support for nested group resolution." - (memberd manual page) |
| netinfod | NetInfo daemon. Provides information about local configuration such as users and groups. |
| nfsiod | The local NFS asynchronous I/O server. Used for access to NFS mounts. |
| notifyd | Mac OS X notification system server. |
| ntpd | Network Time Protocol daemon, responsible for keeping the system date and time synchronized with Internet standard time servers. |
| pmTool | "This is actually a user process that happens to run as root. Activity Monitor uses it to collect information on running processes." Source |
| pppd | Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) Daemon, used for establishing links with another system and to negotiate Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for each end of the link. |
| rpc.lockd | The NFS file locking daemon. Used for NFS mounts. |
| securityd | Handles access to Keychain items. |
| syslogd | Receives and processes log messages, viewable from the Console. |
| update | Writes out (flushes) disk caches every 30 seconds |
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Notes
- Many of these services end in the letter "d". This is a convention to denote a daemon process, that is a process that simply listens and responds to various tasks. For example, the web server, "httpd", listens for web page requests and responds to them (with a web page).
- Your computer may have additional processes listed here, if third party applications have been installed. Likewise, this list may contain third party processes installed on the original author's computer. If you have a clean Mac OS X Tiger installation and would like to help by listing on this article's Talk page which processes are third-party to this list, please do so. However, do not erase the processes already listed here!
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