For the past few days my computer has been revving its fans while not doing very much. I'm talking an instance of Firefox, gedit, few terminator windows and that's about it. I have conky running on my desktop and it tells me the following:

Worse than the noisy fans the power draw (about 50W if you'll believe our energy monitor) are the X lockups. The applications keep freezing and I'm trying to get work done. All this makes Oli a dull boy.

I was really confused that neither conky or htop were showing me a process but I've just run ps aux | sort -k 3 and I'm seeing a number of processes that look like they might be contributing to my pain:

root         6  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Nov27   0:00 [migration/0]

root         7  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Nov27   0:00 [migration/1]

root        11  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Nov27   0:00 [migration/2]

root        14 2589903  0.0   0     0 ?        S    Nov27 21114581:29 [migration/3]

root        17 97.2  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Nov27 11543:55 [migration/4]

root        26 97.7  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Nov27 11601:34 [migration/7]

root        23 99.6  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Nov27 11834:39 [migration/6]

root        20 99.7  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Nov27 11837:29 [migration/5]

What on earth are these migration things? More importantly, how can I kill them without nuking my system?

Edit: Other details. I run on nvidia graphics hardware using the closed-binary driver (from onereic-updates). I have and have recently used VirtualBox. It's an Intel motherboard chipset and processor. I have a dmraid-based SSD and a mdraid-based storage "cluster" (where most of my profile lives). If you need more, just poke me.