Re: Is there a way to keep the 2.6 kjournald from writing to idle disks? (to allow spin-downs)

[Micha Feigin <michf@post.tau.ac.il>]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 02:30:52PM +0100, Lutz Vieweg wrote:
> Bart Samwel wrote:
> 
> >>Well, it's the o.p. system, not mine, but I don't see how noatime will
> >>help him, the atime shouldn't change unless he's doing disk access, and
> >>if he's doing disk access the disk will spin up anyway.
> 
> That's what I thought, too... and I really killed everything that I could
> imagine accessing the disk... but...
> 
> >If something really is accessing the drive, noatime might still help as 
> >long as the accesses are from the cache.
> 
> ... that really helped! I'm kind of surprised, since I didn't use noatime
> before the update, and I still don't know of any process that might do
> the reading, but since mounting / with noatime helped, I'm happy for now.
> 
> My curiosity isn't completely gone, though, so maybe one day I'll try to
> find out who-is-trying-to-read-what, "find -atime ..." didn't reveal the 
> secret
> yet.
> 

It might help you find the culprit. There is a laptopmode patch
for 2.6. If you echo a number n larger then 1 into
/proc/sys/vm/laptopmode it will dump the first n disk accesses to the
console (The docs that come with the patch have the complete
description).

> Regards,
> 
> Lutz Vieweg
> 
> 
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