Re: spindown no longer working after upgrade from etch -> lenny

[Markus Ulbricht <m.ulbricht@gmx.de>]

Hi Matt,

thanks for the answer.
Since spindown was working properly with debian etch
the noatime mount option was already set.
So I still guess something with hddtemp is now built
into the kernel?
If I send the hdd to spindown with

/usr/bin/sg_start 0 /dev/sda

it wakes up after about 4 or 5 minutes and I need
to check out which process might be responsible for that.

Can give me anyone a hint what I have to check?

Markus

Matthew Palmer schrieb:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 09:57:29PM +0100, Markus Ulbricht wrote:
>   
> > Hi all!
> >
> > Since hdd performance of the Thecus N2100 is not so
> > perfect with debian etch (stable, kernel 2.6.18) I did
> > an upgrade to lenny with kernel 2.6.26 including the
> > DMA patches by Martin Michlmayr.
> >
> > Thanks to Martin the hard drive performance is now
> > much better (173 MB/s  cached / 48 MB/s buffered reads).
> >
> > Unfortunately hdd spindown is no longer working.
> >     
>
> Oooh, I've been here.  My problem turned out to be atime updating; I had a
> process that was reading a file every 30 seconds or so, which then caused
> the atime on that file to be updated and hence the disk was never spinning
> down.  Remounting with noatime did the trick.
>
> Assuming that isn't it, it's unlikely that you'll be running enough
> processes to make finding the culprit by killing things one-by-one
> impractical.
>
>   
> > Since I am not so familiar with kernel (re)compilation I am not able
> > to create an appropriate kernel needed for tools like atop which is able
> > to report  processes responsible for disk i/o.
> >     
>
> Rebuilding a kernel isn't hard, but it does take a little while, so I'd go
> with other investigation methods first.
>
> - Matt
>
>
>