Monitoring floppy disk access - linux

Tom Phoenix rb-pdx-pm at redcat.com
Wed Jun 5 15:51:23 CDT 2002


On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Joe Oppegaard wrote:

> I've been trying to find a way to monitor whenever the floppy disk is
> actually being accessed under linux. I don't mean just when it is
> mounted, I mean more like when it is actually read. (ie, the first time
> you do an ls, but not if you did two ls's in a row and it just read it
> from memory the second time). I'm trying to calculate the time that my
> floppy drive is actually in use.

I can't figure out why you'd want such a thing. But I'm not just saying
that; it has a direct bearing on what you really want: Do you want to know
what percentage of the time the disk is spinning, how many hours (or
rotations) a particular diskette or drive motor has turned, how many
sector reads have happened altogether or in the last hour or since
mounting, or something else?

You may be able to get something like what you want with lsof, but you're
probably talking about something that you could only get by hacking into
the floppy drivers (or something equally low-level). That is to say, if
you need to know about something that depends upon whether or not the
cache was read or not, something at the caching level is going to be
needed, of course. But something tells me that you already thought of
that.

Hm. There seeems to be something of an echo in here. Or something.  :-)

--Tom

TIMTOWTDI



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