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From: Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org>
To: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>, Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au>
Subject: Re: Inexplicable disk activity trying to load modules on devfs
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 13:05:40 -0400
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On Saturday 15 June 2002 07:04 pm, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 03:44:30PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > > I just booted into 2.4.19-pre10-ac2 for the first time, and noticed
> > > something very odd: my disk activity light was flashing at about
> > > half-second intervals, very regularly, and I could hear the disk
> > > moving.  I was only able to track it down to which disk controller, via
> > > /proc/interrupts (are there any tools for monitoring VFS activity?
> > > They'd be really useful).  Eventually I hunted down the program causing
> > > it: xmms.
> > >
> > > The reason turned out to be that I hadn't remembered to build my sound
> > > driver for this kernel version.  Every half-second xmms tried to open
> > > /dev/mixer (and failed, ENOENT).  Every time it did that there was
> > > actual disk activity.  Easily reproducible without xmms.  Reproducible
> > > on any non-existant device in devfs, but not for nonexisting files on
> > > other filesystems.  Is something bypassing the normal disk cache
> > > mechanisms here?  That doesn't seem right at all.
> >
> > syslog activity from a printk, perhaps?
>
> Nope.  No log activity whatsoever.

Updated atime on the /dev/blah node?

Random guess...

Rob
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