KDE is preventing laptop disk spindown by incessant configfile-writing
***PLEASE*** KEEP ME CC'ED. I had to go dig the messages I'm replying
to out of the archive (and almost didn't see them at all) because I'm
not on debian-kde!
I still can't keep my laptop's disk from being constantly spun up by KDE.
Thank you for the suggestions about laptop_mode and smart_spindown,
but (a) they don't work or can't be used, and (b) I think you're
missing the point. smart_spindown and the 2.6.6 kernel laptop mode
aren't useful to me, because I'm running the 2.4 kernel. I -did- try
setting /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode to 1, and I installed cpudyn and
configured it to spin disks down. Neither helped. (I haven't [yet]
fiddled with mount options to ext3 to make it flush its journals less
often. This seems dangerous, because it raises the risk of losing
data in a crash or dead battery, and would be unnecessary if I could
just get KDE to stop prodding the disk all the time!)
If I leave the machine sitting in the GNOME Desktop Manager login
screen (e.g., freshly booted and have not yet logged in), the disk
stays spun down. (At least for 15 minutes; that's as long as I gave
it.) But the instant I actually log in, I get constant disk spinups,
again because I cannot keep KDE from -constantly- writing
~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals and korgacrc. This wasn't happening
in the (much older) KDE in my Mandrake 8.2 installation.
Because the machine does NOT spin up the disk when I haven't logged
into KDE, I think I can rule out a huge number of possible random
background processes, etc---something about being logged in is doing
it, and those constantly-written config files sure seem to be the
likely suspects. (Maybe they're being constantly read as well, or
something that's defeating any attempt to defer disk I/O? I dunno.)
Note that I'm not automatically creating any windows when I log in, so
it's not as if, e.g., emacs is writing out stuff periodically because
of some auto-save-list-file-name setting or anything like that. It's
just sitting there in KDE with a desktop with no windows on it.
Btw, a trivial loop reveals that those two files are being updated
-precisely- every minute.
Maybe if I just purge KOrganizer completely, it'll shut up? It seems
to be part of kdepim, which was automatically included by something
else in my installation (probably KDE itself), so I'm unclear on
whether that's a viable option. Maybe if I symlink those files to
/dev/null and hope nothing -actually- needs them?
I haven't (yet) reported this as a non-Debian-specific bug to the KDE
folks, mostly because they have a painful web-forms interface and
won't take mail. I'm still hoping someone here has a useful
suggestion before I have to resort to that.
Thanks again.
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