Re: [PATCH] Laptop-mode v7 for linux 2.6.1

From: Bart Samwel
Date: Mon Jan 12 2004 - 16:52:23 EST


Dumitru Ciobarcianu wrote:
I'm currently trying kernel 2.6.1-mm1 with laptop-mode on a reiserfs partition.
If I kill all daemons running on the system and do nothing with it, I can achieve the 10 minutes spin down time I had expected from laptop-mode. However as soon as I start up X with KDE I get regular spin ups every 30 seconds. Looking at the output of "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump", I see an entry every 30 seconds of "kdeinit(15145): WRITE block 65680 on hda1" followed by a whole load of "reiserfs/0(12): dirtied page" and "reisers/0(12): WRITE block XXXXX on hda1".

Due to the regular 30 second interval writes of kdeinit: kded to block 65680, laptop-mode is not particularly usable on this system.
Is this a problem with reiserfs or with kde and is there any fix available?

Can you take a look at the message that Dumitru Ciobarcianu just sent to the list (about syslog), and check if it's that?

Won't help him if kdeinit is doing fsync() on every friggind write.
syslog has an option to disable that, that's all.

I would be surprised if "kdeinit: kded" would do that. In fact, I run KDE, and it doesn't spin up the disk because of that, even though I have about 15 kdeinit instances running, including one for kded. Of course, I might be mistaken.

Kai, can you check the following: is the WRITE of kdeinit preceded by one or more "kdeinit: kded([some pid]): dirtied page" lines? And if they are, are they coming directly before the WRITE, or 5 seconds before it, or 30 seconds before it? This distance might give a clue about the cause. If it's directly before it (within a second), it's likely that kded calls fsync. If it's about 5 or 30 seconds before it, it might have to do with some kind of writeback or expiry interval.

-- Bart
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/