kde services (probably nepomuk) cause hd to spin up and down continuously

[Sergio Callegari]

With kubuntu precise 64bit, on a DELL E6500 laptop, I have the hard disk spinning down and up continuously when on battery.

Almost as soon as the hard disk spins down, something happens to spin it up again. This when the machine is just sitting idle with no applications running.

This is known to damage the hardware and possibly destroy your hard disk.
Also, this is something that is re-occurring. I believe that it was cured some time ago.

Apparently there are multiple causes to this, but probably kde services have to do with it, because when the machine is out of kde its hard disk spins down just fine and stays spinned down.

Trying to selectively disable kde services, one that appears to have some effect on the spin up is the nepomuk search module. This is weird as I have nepomuk disabled. Maybe other services have an effect too.

Unfortunately, as I do not have a clue about what most of these services do and I cannot find docs about them it is rather difficult for me to sort out what to try. Particularly, I do not know if there is any tool to find out which one among these services is accessing the disk. These services do not appear to be run as independent processes, so that lsof does not seem to help.

Note that this bug is not a secure vulnerability, but should IMHO be given a high priority as noone wants its hardware to be damaged.

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

Assigned to kdebase-apps for a better triage