We have a number of Soekris boxes running Debian Squeeze. They were installed through an automated process consisting of using deboostrap and copying it unto a Compact Flash card. We use puppet to manage the configuration of all these boxes.

Before Debian Squeeze, they were running Voyage Linux which is just a "lighter" version of Debian. Since we have switched, we're seeing the /lib/udev/net.agent process take up an aweful lot of CPU. We have so far been unable to find any clue as to what this really does and why it's taking up some much CPU time.

In htop we see the following :

We are seeing absolutly no syslog messages related to this process so we're a bit lost... So, I am looking for pointers as to what this process does in general and what could be the potential cause of such CPU usage.