what tool to find what's writing to disk

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Jonathan Hudson <jh+ubuntu at daria.co.uk> writes:

>> echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
>
> Forgot to say, you should turn syslogd off first, otherwise you end up
> in a vicious spiral of logged disk activity.

Thanks, but that's no prob for a couple of seconds.  (But seems
strange that "they" set it up to log to 3 files.)

It looks like "pdflush" is the culprit.  Seems to me a memory cleanup
daemon.  I'll be suprised if that's designed-in behavior, but I'll do
some Googling.