On 6/8/05, Remy Blank <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mark Knecht wrote: > > I'm experimenting with leaving a drive turned off in a MythTV > > frontend. I have laptop_mode turned on with whatever it has for > > default settings. I have vixie-cron turned off. Once an hour it seems > > that the drive still spins up for about 1 minute. How can I find > > what's causing that and at least make it more infrequent? I see > > nothing in /var/log/messages nor anything in dmesg. Is there somewhere > > else I should look? > > Laptop mode prevents the drive spinning up when a process writes to the > disk. However, in its default configuration, it is configured to flush > the cached writes after a maximum of 600 seconds (MAX_AGE). On my > laptop, this means that the drive does spin up about every 10 minues. > > Your could try enabling "block dumping" in the kernel: > > echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/block_dump > > After that, the kernel will dump every block read and write to the > kernel log. This might allow you to identify which file is accessed and > which process causes the access. > > Note that you better switch off any logger before doing that (or at > least log through the network), otherwise you'll see all the writes from > the logger itself... > > HTH. > -- Remy
Remy, I got back to looking at this item this evening. dmesg is now full of this: pdflush(185): WRITE block 14947712 on hda3 syslog-ng(5341): dirtied inode 936889 (messages) on hda3 syslog-ng(5341): dirtied inode 936889 (messages) on hda3 kjournald(869): WRITE block 14947712 on hda3 kjournald(869): WRITE block 9112 on hda3 kjournald(869): WRITE block 9120 on hda3 kjournald(869): WRITE block 9128 on hda3 pdflush(185): WRITE block 14947712 on hda3 syslog-ng(5341): dirtied inode 936889 (messages) on hda3 kjournald(869): WRITE block 9136 on hda3 kjournald(869): WRITE block 9144 on hda3 syslog-ng(5341): dirtied inode 936889 (messages) on hda3 syslog-ng(5341): dirtied inode 936889 (messages) on hda3 Is this the logger stuff you were speaking of, or is there a clue here to what's spinning the drive back up? I'm shutting off syslog-ng for a little while to see if the results are considerably different. Thanks, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
