Re: Need help tracing regular write activity in 5 s interval

[Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com>]

Padraig Brady <padraig@antefacto.com> writes:

> I'm sure it will :-)
> 
> However this it just masking the "problem"

Well, the question is, "what is the problem"? 

Your problem is that a debug message is being output by the kernel and
filling your logs. If the debug message doesn't do anybody any good
(and it doesn't) then removing the debug message is a fine way of
solving the problem.

I looked at _why_ the debug message was being generated in this
particular case a long time ago, and it seemed to essentially be a bug
in the IDE code, but other than generating the debug message,
basically a harmless one, and there was no interest in fixing it among
the kernel people I talked to at the time.

(I don't remember details any more; it was several years ago.)

> , and I don't
> think it's "buggy CDROM drives" as I've tried 3 different
> machines with the following drives:
> 
> SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-612
> TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-C2402
> CREATIVE CD5233E
> 
> and they all show the same problem. I.E. logs filling with
> "VFS: Disk change detected on device ide1(22,0)".

*This* problem is certainly not a buggy CD-ROM. There are other
(rarer) problems with logs filling with magicdev that do have to do
with buggy CD-ROM drives; so that is perhaps what you heard about.

(Most common one is that some Yamaha CD-RW's apparently report media
in the drive when they don't have any media in the drive.  magicdev
tries to mount it, and that failure generates an error message.)

[...] 

> Also related, why does the LED flash on every ATA command?
> Is this controlled by the drive or ide controller?
> Are you telling me that windows would flash the LED every so often
> to automount CDs?

Are you sure that the LED flashing isn't the debug messages being
written to your hard drive?

Regards,
                                        Owen