They should be there. Init is the first userspace program that is started, it is responsible for actually mounting /drive0 and /drive1 and starting the player application. It also wait for the player to exit and then starts the shell that you are currently using, and when the shell exits it restarts the player, ad infinitum.

All those [kXXX] processes are in fact kernel threads, which is why they don't have a VSZ or RSS. All of those threads are used to write dirty data back to the disk, so normally the empeg wouldn't really use them.

i.e. kswapd writes dirty anonymous memory pages (f.i. stuff allocated with malloc) to swap, kupdate writes modified inodes (file metadata), and kflushd writes modified file data. I'm not entirely sure about what kpiod does but is has a similar function.

If you look at the process list of recent 2.5 development kernels it is clear that some people took the kernel-thread idea a bit too far.