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.
-- Daniel Jacobowitz Debian GNU/Linux Developer MontaVista Software Carnegie Mellon University - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jun 15 2002 - 22:00:33 EST