Message-ID: <400316A9.30002@samwel.tk>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:50:33 +0100
From: Bart Samwel <bart@samwel.tk>
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To: Dumitru Ciobarcianu <Dumitru.Ciobarcianu@iNES.RO>,
       Kai Krueger <kai.a.krueger@web.de>
CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Laptop-mode v7 for linux 2.6.1
References: <200401121707.i0CH7iQ11796@mailgate5.cinetic.de>	 <4002F627.8000508@samwel.tk> <1073940669.30991.7.camel@LNX.iNES.RO>
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Dumitru Ciobarcianu wrote:
>>>I'm currently trying kernel 2.6.1-mm1 with laptop-mode on a reiserfs partition.
>>>If I kill all daemons running on the system and do nothing with it, I can achieve the 10 minutes spin down time I had expected from laptop-mode. However as soon as I start up X with KDE I get regular spin ups every 30 seconds. Looking at the output of "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump", I see an entry every 30 seconds of "kdeinit(15145): WRITE block 65680 on hda1" followed by a whole load of "reiserfs/0(12): dirtied page" and "reisers/0(12): WRITE block XXXXX on hda1".
>>>
>>>Due to the regular 30 second interval writes of kdeinit: kded to block 65680, laptop-mode is not particularly usable on this system.
>>>Is this a problem with reiserfs or with kde and is there any fix available?
>>
>>Can you take a look at the message that Dumitru Ciobarcianu just sent to 
>>the list (about syslog), and check if it's that?
> 
> Won't help him if kdeinit is doing fsync() on every friggind write.
> syslog has an option to disable that, that's all.

I would be surprised if "kdeinit: kded" would do that. In fact, I run 
KDE, and it doesn't spin up the disk because of that, even though I have 
about 15 kdeinit instances running, including one for kded. Of course, I 
might be mistaken.

Kai, can you check the following: is the WRITE of kdeinit preceded by 
one or more "kdeinit: kded([some pid]): dirtied page" lines? And if they 
are, are they coming directly before the WRITE, or 5 seconds before it, 
or 30 seconds before it? This distance might give a clue about the 
cause. If it's directly before it (within a second), it's likely that 
kded calls fsync. If it's about 5 or 30 seconds before it, it might have 
to do with some kind of writeback or expiry interval.

-- Bart
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