Re: Need help tracing regular write activity in 5 s interval

[Padraig Brady <padraig@antefacto.com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> Padraig Brady <padraig@antefacto.com> writes:
> 
>>I'm sure it will :-)
>>
>>However this it just masking the "problem"
> 
> Well, the question is, "what is the problem"? 
> 
> Your problem is that a debug message is being output by the kernel and
> filling your logs. If the debug message doesn't do anybody any good
> (and it doesn't) then removing the debug message is a fine way of
> solving the problem.

True. But I thought there might be (future) side affects of
cdrom_media_changed() always returning true. Why is it there at all?

> I looked at _why_ the debug message was being generated in this
> particular case a long time ago, and it seemed to essentially be a bug
> in the IDE code

Yes that's my guess, and I may have time to look at it.

, but other than generating the debug message,
> basically a harmless one, and there was no interest in fixing it among
> the kernel people I talked to at the time.
> 
> (I don't remember details any more; it was several years ago.)
> 
> 
>>, and I don't
>>think it's "buggy CDROM drives" as I've tried 3 different
>>machines with the following drives:
>>
>>SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-612
>>TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-C2402
>>CREATIVE CD5233E
>>
>>and they all show the same problem. I.E. logs filling with
>>"VFS: Disk change detected on device ide1(22,0)".
> 
> *This* problem is certainly not a buggy CD-ROM. There are other
> (rarer) problems with logs filling with magicdev that do have to do
> with buggy CD-ROM drives; so that is perhaps what you heard about.
> 
> (Most common one is that some Yamaha CD-RW's apparently report media
> in the drive when they don't have any media in the drive.  magicdev
> tries to mount it, and that failure generates an error message.)
> 
> [...] 
> 
>>Also related, why does the LED flash on every ATA command?
>>Is this controlled by the drive or ide controller?
>>Are you telling me that windows would flash the LED every so often
>>to automount CDs?
> 
> Are you sure that the LED flashing isn't the debug messages being
> written to your hard drive?

Yep. Good point though.

thanks,
Padraig.