This box has been very reliable until recently…
It is an HP quad 64 with 8GB of ram.
I ran opeSUSE 10.3 until recently, then switched to 11.0
(format /, clean install). The disk blips about once every second.
A quick look showed that pdflush was writing the sectors of
sda2, in order, over, and over, and over. sda2 (reiser) is
a data drive containing ISO images and home made mpegs - nothing
else. I never access it unless I’m using Qdvdauthor.
There’s no Mono, no Beagle, no Kerry - all uninstalled.
This machine has never done this. When I’m not using it, the
disk has always been completely silent.
As openSUSE 11.0 would occasionaly hang on boot for 2 or 3
minutes before proceeding (and the kinternet VPN config refused
to remember the VPN passwords), I switched back to 10.3
(format /, clean install). The constant pdflush disk activity
continues even on 10.3 - it did not do this with the previous
10.3 install.
blip, blip, blip, blip 24 x 7…it’s driving me nuts.
MemTotal: 8191240 kB
MemFree: 7649504 kB
Buffers: 42796 kB
Cached: 269596 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 220748 kB
Inactive: 206724 kB
SwapTotal: 2104472 kB
SwapFree: 2104472 kB
Dirty: 160 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 115092 kB
Mapped: 55112 kB
Slab: 38980 kB
SReclaimable: 24156 kB
SUnreclaim: 14824 kB
PageTables: 7984 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 6200092 kB
Committed_AS: 311348 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 90732 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359644667 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB