gsd-housekeeping is regularly opening /etc/fstab and the atime update is causing meta data write fluesh

Bug #1846779 reported by Colin Ian King
14
This bug affects 3 people
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-househeeping-15.min

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.

Revision history for this message
Colin Ian King (colin-king) wrote :
Changed in gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → High
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
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