LinuxQuestions.org - Typing on keyboard causes disk access; wtf?

Hey All,

I u/g my 2.6.14 kernel to 2.6.16, did a dist-upgrade (Debian Sarge) and rebuilt my initrd. Now, every time I type a key on my keyb I hear the disk get accessed. If i hold down my shift/ctrl/alt key, the disk goes nuts, but I am (almost) sure that my box didn't used to do this (could be wrong?).

I should note that this only happens when typing on the keyb connected to the box (either at the console or in X or whatever) and not during an ssh session or the like from a remote box.

I am guessing that this happens because the io from my keyb is going through a dev file that is on my disk, but how do I stop it? The sound is annoying and I'v reduced the lifetime of my disks just by typing this question (through uneccesary disk access). :(

I have googled and LQ-searched but have come up blank on this particular issue (well, I have learned a bunch of stuff about unrelated things so it hasn't been a total loss).

I see that a new device manager came with my 2.6.16 kernel (udev) and apparently, it operates slightly differently than devfs did so my theory is that udev is doing something that I am not expecting. I see that /dev/console (which is where I *think* local keyb io goes) and /dev/null need to exist before udev will work.

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Some system info:

# mount
/dev/md0 on / type ext3 (rw,usrquota)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/sdc1 on /backup type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sdd1 on /u02 type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /dev type tmpfs (rw,size=10M,mode=0755)

--

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
293033536 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices: <none>

--

# ls -ld /dev/null /dev/console
crw------- 1 root root 5, 1 2006-05-21 10:26 /dev/console
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 2006-05-21 05:02 /dev/null

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And just incase udev does have something to do with this:

# cat /etc/udev/udev.conf
# udev.conf

# The initial syslog(3) priority: "err", "info", "debug" or its
# numerical equivalent. For runtime debugging, the daemons internal
# state can be changed with: "udevcontrol log_priority=<value>".
udev_log="err"

# maximum size of the /dev tmpfs
tmpfs_size="10M"

--

# grep console /etc/udev/*
/etc/udev/links.conf:M console c 5 1
/etc/udev/permissions.rules:KERNEL=="console", MODE="0600", GROUP="root"
/etc/udev/run.rules:# ignore the events generated by virtual consoles
/etc/udev/run.rules:KERNEL=="console", OPTIONS+="last_rule"

--

# grep null /etc/udev/*
/etc/udev/links.conf:M null c 1 3
/etc/udev/permissions.rules:KERNEL=="null", MODE="0666"

Other possible factors contributing:
* This is a new keyb. I moved to another country and the old one got lost in space. This is a USB keyb plugged into the PS2 slot via an adaptor.

Also, my USB mouse (MS Optical) keeps getting de-detected in that it require me to keep unplugging it and plugging it back in. This is definitely a new problem, but I will worry about that later as I at least have a workaround. I only bring it up because it might be related.

Dave.