In above example we can see that total of 4 watchdog threads created by the kernel itself.
Watchdog tasks are high priority kernel threads that gets current timestamp every time it is scheduled and save the value in a per-CPU data structure.
If that timestamp is not updated for 2 x watchdog_thresh seconds (the softlockup threshold) the softlockup detector will dump useful debug information to the system log, after which it will call panic (through kernel.softlockup_panic sysctl variable) if it was instructed to do so or resume execution of
other kernel code.
User mode processes can not make soft lockups, they are always re-scheduled by the kernel. Soft lockups only occurs in kernel mode codes which can be a buggy driver etc.