Poor disk drive performance with FC3 RC3

[Steffen Persvold]

On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 19:27 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 01:59:48PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Basically hal does this (every two seconds)
> > 
> >  open("/dev/hdc", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE) = 0
> >  ioctl(0, CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, 0x7fffffff) = 1
> >  close(0) 
> > 
> > Can some kernel person comment on why this is killing performance on
> > the /dev/hda harddrive when the optical drive at /dev/hdb is polled?
> 
> Because /dev/hdb is powersaved. Every time you poll it the laptop powers up
> the drive (costly on power/time), polls the TOC, replies and a second or so
> later powers back down.  During the power up, poll TOC sequence it locks the
> bus so your IDE bus spends 1.5 of every 2 seconds jammed by the drive.
> 
> We have some bug reports for this from magicdev too.
> 

So is it even worth filing a new bug report on this then ? Is there any
way to fix this in software (kernel) ?

Regards,
Steffen