"kworker" is a placeholder process for kernel worker threads, which perform most of the actual processing for the kernel, especially in cases where there are interrupts, timers, I/O, etc. These typically correspond to the vast majority of any allocated "system" time to running processes. It is not something that can be safely removed from the system in any way, and is completely unrelated to nepomuk or KDE (except in that these programs may make system calls, which may require the kernel to do something).
There were some reports of excessive kworker activity for relatively
idle systems starting during 2.6.36 development (example discussion), and wide reports of confusion and problems with 2.6.38 (although many of these reports include the word "Natty", so I presume these people not to have used any kernel between 2.6.35 (distributed in Ubuntu 10.10) and 2.6.38 (distributed in Ubuntu 11.04).
I've found many reports of something that "fixed" this for one or another user. Most "fixes" seem to be related to updates of the kernel of various sorts. Where the update can be tracked to a specific issue, it seems to often be some driver or kernel service that has been patched to not misbehave: I have the impression that there are a very large number of things in the kernel that can cause a behaviour which is observed as excessive kworker usage.
If you find the system unusable due to excessive kworker activity, I would recommend trying to do fewer things. If you think you're not doing anything, try shutting down long-running services or timers (RSS readers, mail readers, file indexers, activity trackers, etc.). If this doesn't work, try restarting. If your system allows you to enable or disable hardware in a pre-boot environment, try turning off hardware you aren't using. If it happens on every restart before you do anything, you could try uninstalling things, but at this point you'll want to be running syscall profiling tools to track down specific applications that seem to be causing this overload.
It is to be hoped that your specific system will stop expressing this behaviour with a future kernel upgrade (and many of the most common causes of this have been solved).
Best Answer
Instead I think this CPU usage is not normal and is related to the well-known kworker bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/887793
The solution for me and for many others was, first of all, find out the "gpe" that is causing the bad stuff with something like:
and check for an high value (mine was gpe13 - with a value like 200K - so, you have to change it accordingly, if differs). After that:
Add this line, so it will be executed every startup/reboot:
Save/exit. Then, to make it work also after wakeup from suspend:
Add this stuff:
Save/exit, done.
Tested and working on :