Linux kernel starts a watchdog thread for each of the CPU core in the system. You can see this threads:
$ ps uax | grep watchdog
root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Feb19 0:00 [watchdog/0]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Feb19 0:00 [watchdog/1]
root 16 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Feb19 0:00 [watchdog/2]
root 21 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Feb19 0:00 [watchdog/3]
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.