Ubuntu 10.04: Why is ksmd eating CPU cycles? | Interphero Miscellany. Okay, just stumbled upon this on my server and blogging it for later reference. When using kvm, on newer Ubuntu versions, ksmd appears, which actually compares memory pages between virtual machines and only stores duplicate pages once - this saves RAM but consumes CPU. If you don't do over-commit on memory, you can safely turn it off.