[solved] Excessive disk usage, disk fails to be idle

[nozombian]

Hi, I have clean install of recently build openwrt, attached new usb hdd, fdisked and created ext4 and installed samba. It works, but the on disk led still blinks, disk fails to be idle. So I enabled block dump to see what going on (echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump) and I see a lot of these in dmesg or logread:

Thu Jul 26 10:28:32 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  517.761144] jbd2/sda1-8(539): WRITE block 973342496 on sda1 (8 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:32 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  517.761178] jbd2/sda1-8(539): WRITE block 973342504 on sda1 (8 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:32 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  517.761193] jbd2/sda1-8(539): WRITE block 973342512 on sda1 (8 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:32 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  517.762436] jbd2/sda1-8(539): WRITE block 973342520 on sda1 (8 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:33 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  519.291845] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520102144 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:33 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  519.292030] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520104192 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:35 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  520.971852] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520106240 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:35 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  520.972041] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520108288 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:37 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  522.651817] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520110336 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:37 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  522.652003] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520112384 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:38 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  524.331823] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520114432 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:38 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  524.332005] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520116480 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:39 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  524.482686] jbd2/sda1-8(539): WRITE block 973342528 on sda1 (8 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:39 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  524.482720] jbd2/sda1-8(539): WRITE block 973342536 on sda1 (8 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:39 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  524.483524] jbd2/sda1-8(539): WRITE block 973342544 on sda1 (8 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:40 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  526.011806] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520118528 on sda1 (2048 sectors)
Thu Jul 26 10:28:40 2018 kern.debug kernel: [  526.011991] ext4lazyinit(607): WRITE block 520120576 on sda1 (2048 sectors)

I found, that this has something to do with speeding up the ext4 fs creation, but I want to ask if this will ever stop, or after each reboot (remount) this will be happening over and over again? Thank you.

[mbo2o]

@nozombian

ext4lazyinit

Seems to be just initializing, it should eventually complete.

Ext4 Filesystem - Thomas-Krenn-Wiki-en

[nozombian]

Thank you, I thought it will take forever, but once I added to /etc/config/fstab init_itable=0 parameter:

config mount
        option device '/dev/sda1'
        option options 'rw,relatime,data=writeback,errors=remount-ro,nodev,init_itable=0'

it speeded that damn thing up. Now the disk sleeps, even after reboot it does not blink anymore, so I guess everything will be ok

[xfx_6200]

Thank you very much for your posting. I help to solve the same problem! I recommend installing "hd-idle"