xfssyncd and disk spin down

[Dave Chinner]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 06:55:32PM +0200, Petre Rodan wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have a problem with a hard drive that never managed to spin
> down. this drive is a storage space, not a system disk, the only
> thing that generated writes is the nfs server that exports its
> contents. it has only one large xfs partition on it.
> 
> upon closer inspection it turns out that after the first Write
> action to that partition, an xfssyncd process continues to write
> to that partition each 36 seconds and it doesn't stop doing that,
> even if there are no more Writes from the exterior. this keeps the
> drive busy with varying consequences. more about that later.

Should be fixed in 2.6.37 by the commit:

1a387d3 xfs: dummy transactions should not dirty VFS state

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david at fromorbit.com