What is the Spil process?

General Discussion
1

I am using the Dietpi OS in the Odroid xu4 with the cloudshell and a HDD with ext4.

Using top, there was a process name spil, and was using about 2-5% of the CPU.

top - 20:45:03 up 22:55,  2 users,  load average: 0,12, 0,17, 0,21
Tasks: 137 total,   1 running, 136 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0,5 us,  1,7 sy,  0,0 ni, 97,6 id,  0,0 wa,  0,0 hi,  0,1 si,  0,0 st
KiB Mem:   2038632 total,   393500 used,  1645132 free,    15876 buffers
KiB Swap:   102376 total,        0 used,   102376 free.   147964 cached Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
13768 root      20   0    4556   1256    856 R   5,3  0,1   0:00.59 top
  243 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   2,8  0,0  36:57.70 spi1
13770 root      20   0    3372    748    620 S   2,5  0,0   0:00.08 agetty
12367 www-data  20   0   13724   9204    572 S   1,9  0,5   0:05.68 dnsmasq
    1 root      20   0    4980   2932   1480 S   1,6  0,1  19:52.39 systemd

Tried to identify it with lsof:

# lsof -p 243
COMMAND PID USER   FD      TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
spi1    243 root  cwd       DIR  179,2     1024    2 /
spi1    243 root  rtd       DIR  179,2     1024    2 /
spi1    243 root  txt   unknown                      /proc/243/exe

Looks like some sort of program started on init, maybe a subprocess of systemd.

So, It’s not a problem really, I am just trying to find what it does.

2

I believe its related to the SPI interface the Odroid Cloudshell 320x240 panel uses.

I get the same on my setup:

root@DietPi-XU4:~# ps aux | grep [s]pi
root       250  1.4  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Jul05 226:39 [spi1]

Appears to be the module spi_s3c64xx:

root@DietPi-XU4:~# lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
md4                     3581  0
cfg80211              454265  0
rfkill                 12936  1 cfg80211
nls_utf8                1221  1
cifs                  327598  2
dns_resolver            4713  1 cifs
cdc_ether               4507  0
usbnet                 22217  1 cdc_ether
r8152                  53236  0
ina231_sensor           8388  0
i2c_s3c2410             8876  0
fb_ili9340              3597  1
fbtft_device           37972  0
fbtft                  31765  2 fb_ili9340,fbtft_device
syscopyarea             3057  1 fbtft
sysfillrect             3400  1 fbtft
sysimgblt               2147  1 fbtft
fb_sys_fops             1348  1 fbtft
spi_s3c64xx            13713  0
fuse                   75445  1

Remove module, spi1 dissapears:

root@DietPi-XU4:~# modprobe -rf spi_s3c64xx
root@DietPi-XU4:~# ps aux | grep [s]pi
#no return results

I’am in the garden so I can’t confirm if it also stops the panel displaying, although, i’d imagine it would.

3

Thanks for the reply, it made more sense now.

I did also mistake the number 1 with the lower case l in the terminal font also, after seeing you post now it returns more results on the web.

4

Hehe, its easily done.
Its when you start mistaking ’ for `, that can cause issues, especially in bash/shell scripts lol.