Tracking the polling software

[Nils Kassube]

Thierry de Coulon wrote:
> On Monday 13 December 2010 06:36:57 am Nils Kassube wrote:
> > Tony Pursell wrote:
> > > On Sun, 2010-12-12 at 08:47 +0100, Thierry de Coulon wrote:
> > > > So how could I find out "who" is polling "something" every two
> > > > seconds?
> > 
> > Try the command
> > 
> > udisks --dump|grep poll
> > 
> > and check if there is a 1 at the end of any column.
> 
> Yep, I got five "1"
> 
> > If there is, use
> > "udisks --dump" (without grep) to see which device it is. I suppose
> > you can also change the behaviour if you want but I didn't try it
> > myself.
> 
> /dev/sr0
> /dev/sr1
> /dev/sdb
> /dev/sdc
> /dev/sdd

sr0 and sr1 are CD/DVD drives and therefore polling these is normal, but 
what are sdb, sdc, sdd? A card reader perhaps or USB sticks?

> However,  udisks --inhibit-polling /dev/sr0 seems to let you stop
> polling on only one disk. I managed to stop all polling by starting
> five terminals. I'm a little worried at starting udisks
> --inhibit-all-polling as I am not sure what and why is being polled,
> but assuming only the five disks found before would be affected, I
> could try that.

As I understand it, the devices are polled to check for a media change, 
like inserting a CD. If you disable polling on all devices, the system 
wouldn't detect if you insert a card to a card reader or if you unplug a 
USB stick. That may be not what you want. OTOH, from your initial post 
it seems you are worried about your hard disk light which is probably 
only lit when one of the CD/DVD drives is polled. Therefore it might be 
an option to disable polling only for sr0 and sr1 if you don't use them 
often.


Nils