Linux kernel - and regular sync'ing?

[Brian Dushaw]

Hey There Kernel-people!
   I have a disk accessing question you may be able to help me with,
if I may be so bold....
   I have a notebook computer, and in the interests of saving power
I am trying to get its disk to go into suspend mode (hdparm -S 6 /dev/hda,
say...)  However, something seems to be continuously accessing the disk
at irregular intervals of 10-30 seconds, most likely calls to sync, so
that the disk never gets to sleep for long.  I've followed advice in the
various HOWTO's, e.g. modifying the line "ud::once:/sbin/update" in
/etc/inittab to only sync once an hour, to no avail.  Watching "top", it
sure looks as if various kernel-based daemons are responsible...nothing
else is running!
   Can you offer me any advice?  Any tweeks I can make to tell the system
that sync'ing only once every 5 minutes is o.k.?
   I have the 2.4.2 kernel (older kernels behaved the same way) and
the RedHat 6.2 distribution.

Thx!
B.D.

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Brian Dushaw
Applied Physics Laboratory
University of Washington
1013 N.E. 40th Street
Seattle, WA  98105-6698
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Web Page:  http://staff.washington.edu/dushaw/index.html