Re: Inexplicable disk activity trying to load modules on devfs

From: Andrew Morton (akpm@zip.com.au)
Date: Sat Jun 15 2002 - 17:44:30 EST


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?

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