Re: faster boots?

Pavel Machek
2002-04-14T19:40:58Z

Hi!

> > > while :; do cat /proc/stat; sleep 1; done
> > >
> > > Then I see a few writes have occurred at nearly every iteration. I
> > > think that is due to the atime updates, because using "noatime" there
> > > are no writes at most iterations.
> >
> > Well, that's no problem. noflushd stops kflushd, so it should work
> > even with atime. [It works for me with atimes!]
> >
> > > But more interesting: I only see those few-per-second atime writes while
> > > noflushd is running. If I kill noflushd then they go away.
> >
> > ?
>
> Another curious thing: even if the regular writes were caused by atime
> updates, there is no reason for them to be flushed every second, is
> there?
>
> Yet the hard disk light flashes about once per second when (a) running
> the above shell line and (b) running noflushd, and (c) _not_ using
> "noatime" (just "nodiratime"). (Remove any of those and it stops). And
> /proc/stat shows writes happening.
>
> This is on ext3. I wonder if journalling is causing a problem. Pavel,
> are you running ext3?

No, plain old ext2. Yep, ext3 could have some strange interactions
with noflushd.
Pavel
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