Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 15 Jun 2002 17:22:44 -0500 | From | Daniel Jacobowitz <> | Subject | Inexplicable disk activity trying to load modules on devfs |
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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/
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