[Bug 27323] Re: hal's automount_enabled_hint causes disk activity every few seconds

[Akkana Peck]

Nope. Neither your example, nor the example that's already in the file (which is different: it nests the storage.removable case inside the storage.hotpluggable case) stops the polling. If anything it might be more frequent after making the change. (Yes, I did also uncomment the lines, and I'm rebooting between changes, not just manually restarting processes.)

As to what to do about the bug and whether it's still a bug, I don't have a problem with automount (and even polling, if that's truly the only way the kernel can do automount) being on by default. But there are still some bugs left (IMHO, of course):

1. There should be a way to actually stop the polling. Currently, the file says it's possible but the lines in the file don't actually seem to change anything -- surely that counts as a bug?

2. Is it really necessary to have two daemons doing a seemingly identical poll, once a second (or so) each? Couldn't one daemon handle it, and at least cut down the polling by half?

3. Isn't a polling interval of twice a second (or even once a second) rather aggressive? Does hal not allow any possibility of tuning the polling interval?

If a way is found to change the polling, I'd even argue that both the interval, and whether to poll at all, would make an excellent addition to one of the sysadmin menus. I bet lots of people don't know that frequent polling is going on, and would disable it or at least scale the interval longer if they knew. But that's  more an RFE than a bug, and commandline ways of controlling this (short of sudo aptitude purge hald) would be plenty to fix this bug.

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hal's automount_enabled_hint causes disk activity every few seconds
https://launchpad.net/bugs/27323