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Re: Does XFS prevent disk spindown?

To: Thor Kristoffersen <thorkr@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Does XFS prevent disk spindown?
From: Timothy Shimmin <tes@xxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:05:34 +1000
Cc: xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <m2y77smmdj.fsf@xxxxxxxxxx>
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Thor Kristoffersen wrote:
(It looks like my reply never made it to the list so I'm trying again.)

Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
David Chinner wrote:
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 08:26:00PM +0200, Thor Kristoffersen wrote:
I've noticed that when I spin down XFS-mounted disks they spin up again
shortly afterwards.  I used iostat to monitor disk accesses to a mounted
partition (with noatime) in single user mode.  Apparently there is a write
access to the partition approximately every 35 seconds, even if the
partition is idle.  As far as I can understand, since there is no data that
needs to be flushed this must be done by an XFS daemon for some purpose.
Use blktrace, or echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump to see what block and
who's writing it...  it's probably the superblock?  what kernel?

This is kernel version 2.6.24.  More specifically it's a Debian kernel from
package linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 (2.6.24-4).

I put the system in runlevel 1 and executed the test as you suggested.  On
/dev/sda3 I have mounted (with noatime) an XFS filesystem that contains
data that is not supposed to be accessed by any process.  In the output
below I have filtered out all accesses to other partitions.  (BTW, this is
not actually the disk that I wanted to spin down, but I think the log
proves my point.)


I'm wondering if that is writing to the xfs ondisk log/journal in those cases.
What does 'xfs_logprint -t' show in these "idle" states
after these writes?

--Tim

Thor

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