I'm getting this sort of behaviour too. 1.3.80, there is disk activity
every five or six seconds. procinfo says it's most often writing about
three pages, but this varies. Under 1.2.13, on the same system, the
closest I got to this was the minutely atrun. In both cases I have
continuously running processes, including a top and three tail -fs. I
suspect that the tails are what is causing this.
Have some major changes to the buffering algorithm been made recently?
Or are more syscalls causing changes to an inode's atime? Or a change
to the default bdflush parameters? Linus?
-zefram
P.S. until I rebooted to 1.3.80 a couple of days ago, my 1.2.13 system
had an uptime of over three months. That's really quite a stable
kernel.