Bug 115795

Summary:	Disk light flickers during idle on eMachines 6260 (AMD Athlon 64 on MSI 7093)
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0	Reporter:	Simon Dales <novell>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	E-mail List <bnc-team-screening>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Preview 4
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	tail -500 /va/log/messages

Description Simon Dales 2005-09-08 07:12:15 UTC

Disk light flicks on every second or so (flick,flick,sleep) when the machine is 
idle. A similar flick, but different pattern occurs in XP. If you put your head 
to the case you can hear the disk arm move every twenty seconds.

It occurs in 64 bit suse 9.3 and 10beta4 and XP, but not 32 bit.

a) what's going on?
b) does it matter? Probably stops the disk sleeping, and wears the arm out.

Comment 1 Michael Gross 2005-09-08 10:15:12 UTC

This might just be normal (disk cache being flushed, ...), but to be sure please
provide 500 lines of your syslog and attach the file:

% tail -500 /var/log/messages > syslog.txt

If there is some kind of problem it will probably be logged there.

Comment 2 Simon Dales 2005-09-10 08:40:43 UTC

Created attachment 49506 [details]
tail -500 /va/log/messages

Comment 3 Simon Dales 2005-09-11 09:36:46 UTC

Interestingly when I installed 10rc1 I get a different pattern of flick. It now 
goes "flick, sleep" rather than "flick, flick, sleep".

XP does "flick, sleep" too.

Comment 4 Michael Gross 2005-09-12 09:47:57 UTC

Frankly I'm at a loss right now. This might just be a hardware-dependent
problem. The system log does also not provide the right clue, though it contains
a lot of errors. You're running smartd i.e., disable it and check if the error
is still occouring.

As you pointed out that this problem exists unter Windows XP either, I cannot
see that this is a kernel- or Linux-problem at all. I'm closing this bug. If you
have prove that I'm in error, reopen the bug and provide the neccessary information.

Sorry.

P.S. Furthermore: This would be really hard to locate and does not influence
either the stability nor the performance of your system.