gsd-housekeeping is regularly opening /etc/fstab and the atime update is causing meta data write fluesh
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
High
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
gsd-housekeeping is opening /etc/fstab every 60 seconds and because it is being opened without the O_NOATIME flag the access time updates are causing regular meta data flushes. On an idle laptop this can cause the HDD to spin up, flush write and spin down every 60 seconds. This consumes power unnecessarily.
I've traced this using health-check for 15 minutes of activity:
sudo heath-check -p gsd-housekeeping -d 900 -f -r -v > gnome-gsd-
See attached log.
Running strace on the process will show that the open of /etc/fstab does not use O_NOATIME, hence atime is being updated on the file each time it is accessed, causing dirtying of metadata for this file and hence the dirty metadata has to be flushed back periodically.
Can this be fixed to save some power. I've estimated it can save ~0.1 Watts on my Lenovo x220.
Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.