[CDBUG-talk] atactl--?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:36 PM -0500 2/3/06, Steve Moon wrote:
>..., but the hard drive of the machine is really noisy, and I'd
>like it to spin down once the app(s) are running -- there's no
>real need for hard drive access once it's working.
>
>I found the atactl command, and it does indeed provide settings
>that actually cause the drive to spin down. But then is spins
>back up frequently, does whatever it needed to do, then spins
>down again, etc.
>
>I figure it must be some process or kernel process that wants
>to access a temp file or whatever every few minutes.

Presumably it is either I/O to files in /var, or maybe reading info
from /etc.  I'm not sure of the details for openbsd, but you could
see about setting up some kind of ram disk for /var, and see what
that does.  Might be nothing more than I/O to files under /var/log
from syslogd.

As a test, you might try killing syslogd, mounting a memory disk
on /var/log, touch a bunch of files so they exist, and then start
syslogd back up.  See if that's quieter.  If that works, then you'd
have to add a few extra steps to "do it right", and to periodically
save away the information from the memory disk to the real hard drive,
and then spin the hard drive back down again.

I realize that isn't quite what you were asking for, but I don't
know the answer to your question so I'll make up my own...  :-)

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu