Linux seems to only grow more and more kernel threads, and very few of them end up doing anything much and occupy very little memory (just a kernel stack, 8K I think?, and a few other structures and not much more).
Ignoring them by default therefore seems like a reasonable thing to do, and means we don't have to manually set "procs" to a fixed value just so that we can append "-k".
As an example, my laptop currently has five hundred kernel threads, and that's with only 2 cores of 2 threads each. A machine with a reasonable number of CPUs would have many more, since many kernel threads are per-CPU.
"auto" is already supposed to do the right thing, so I'd suggest unconditionally adding "-k" on releases where it is supported (trusty supports it, so maybe no need to even check) when "auto" is set.
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