atime on devices

From: Lev A. Melnikovsky
Date: Tue Aug 16 2005 - 04:49:17 EST


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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