Re: Inexplicable disk activity trying to load modules on devfs

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 03:44:30PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> syslog activity from a printk, perhaps?

Nope.  No log activity whatsoever.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Debian GNU/Linux Developer
MontaVista Software                         Carnegie Mellon University