atime on devices

[Lev A. Melnikovsky]

Hi!

It is sometimes useful to know device access time. Things that I have in 
mind are the software-based hard disk inactivity spindown (some brain 
damaged IDE drives fail to follow "hdparm -S" if the argument is longer 
than 1/2 hour) and sound card muting if it is not touched for a while. 
Notebook users might want to powerdown their network cards after 
inactivity as well.

I wonder if such functionality is already available or is planned to be 
available some time soon?

Earlier discussions I found in the list mention also atime of tty, mouse 
and other human interface device (but "access" meaning is somewhat 
different).

Thanks
-L.

P.S. For my own purposes of the disk spindown I'm using an ad-hoc patch 
(which I wrote as a proof of the concept while using late 2.2 kernels, it 
is still functional in 2.4.30, never had time to rewrite it properly) to 
ide-disk.c, so that it exports the last access time as 
/proc/ide/hdX/last_access. Keeping atime attribute along with device files 
themselves seems more logical, but might cause side effects...
-
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