After installing Mandriva 2010.0 64 bit Linux on a new machine for mom, I noticed the hard drive would blip at least every two seconds (like clockwork) when logged into kde. To me this is odd behavior that I have never seen before.

I have the mom box sitting next to MY home machine. Although they are different architectures, they are both running ML2010.0 64 bit & kde4. The only real difference between the two (other than hardware) is the filesystem.

My box is still running reiserfs. The mom box is running ext4 (and this is the first time I have ever used ext4 on anything). I used the (wonderful) iotop program to find and confirm that on the mom machine, there is a pseudo process named "kjournald2" that activates every two seconds, exactly like the hard drive light shows (and at the same instant).

The bizarre two second blips start after I login to her box. If I sit on the kdm screen, it blips randomly, waiting as long as 30 sec. As soon as I login, the 2 second blips start, even when not running any apps.

Meanwhile, I am logged into my box with dozens of apps open and it blips very rarely, and randomly.

1) Has anyone else seen this behavior?
2) Is there a way to stop it?
3) Should I even worry about it?

Thanks!

I have confirmation from another user- someone using the 32 bit version on a laptop. So I have filed a bug report: https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=56245

Still could use additional ideas, confirmations, etc. Anyone else out there running KDE4.3 reading this? Do you have the same behavior? Which filesystem type are you using?

ext4 is a journaled file system. I suspect that kjournald2 is related. I installed and ran iotop here too, and see the process popping up. The k in front of the name (kjournald2) leads me to think it is a KDE daemon, and my guess is that KDE is checking the file systemś journal, perhaps for new commits. Do you have any evidence that kjournald2 is performing disk writes? If the process is checking the drives buffers, you may still see activity, but it will not affect the life of the device if the disks are not being accessed. In any case, the benefits of a journalized file system far outweigh any potential reduction to the life of the drive. In practice, a hard drive will be replaced due to technological improvements long before its expected end of life approaches unless a manufacturing or design flaw exists. Please post back with any results from your bug report.

The "k" is for kernel. It is a pseudo process that belongs to the kernel and it is, indeed, related to ext4. But reiserfs is also journaled and it doesn't have a pseudo process by that name. ext3 is also journaled and I have evidence of yet another user with 2010.0 + KDE4 + ext3 that does NOT have the repeated hard drive access every 2 seconds.

It appears to be disk writes, but it hard to tell exactly. About every second or third blip, I can hear the heads move when I put my ear on the drive. So even if it is a read, it could still wear out that mechanism prematurely.

I will post back whatever I learn, so anyone else looking for answers will find them.

FWIW I have the same issue running Ubuntu server 9.10, 32 bit version. I use ext4 as well. I suspect it is a journaling thing, but have not been able to tune it.

Similar shown by GKrellM and HDD LED on Slackware 13.0 with Xfce and ext4.

Thanks to everyone for continuing to provide data on this. Looks like it might be cross-distro and also not KDE related. I updated the bug report on Mandriva.