various kde programs spin in a poll/read loop against their respective config files

[Christof Schulze]

Hello everyone,

the discussion in -current and the behavior of my hard disk caused me to 
investigate. Whenever kde programs are run on this system, the hard disk 
will not spin down (even when excessive timeouts for syncs are in effect)
So I ran truss against kwallet and plasma-desktop to find out they do the 
same thing:

stat("/home/erika/.kde4/share/apps/kwallet",{ mode=drwx------ 
,inode=56314,size=3,blksize=4096 }) = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.430272035 })		 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.430363671 })		 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.430432397 })		 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.430516490 })		 = 0 (0x0)
read(8,0x808f9102c,4096)			 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily 
unavailable'
poll({3/POLLIN 9/POLLIN 8/POLLIN 5/POLLIN},4,0)	 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.430734403 })		 = 0 (0x0)
read(8,0x808f9102c,4096)			 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily 
unavailable'
clock_gettime(4,{10454.430882473 })		 = 0 (0x0)
read(8,0x808f9102c,4096)			 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily 
unavailable'
poll({3/POLLIN 9/POLLIN 8/POLLIN 5/POLLIN},4,499) = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.939752100 })		 = 0 (0x0)
read(8,0x808f9102c,4096)			 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily 
unavailable'
clock_gettime(4,{10454.939905198 })		 = 0 (0x0)
stat("/home/erika/.kde4/share/apps/kwallet",{ mode=drwx------ 
,inode=56314,size=3,blksize=4096 }) = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.940151049 })		 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.940242126 })		 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.940309456 })		 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.940392710 })		 = 0 (0x0)
read(8,0x808f9102c,4096)			 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily 
unavailable'
poll({3/POLLIN 9/POLLIN 8/POLLIN 5/POLLIN},4,0)	 = 0 (0x0)
clock_gettime(4,{10454.940612580 })		 = 0 (0x0)
read(8,0x808f9102c,4096)			 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily 
unavailable'
clock_gettime(4,{10454.940760929 })		 = 0 (0x0)
read(8,0x808f9102c,4096)			 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily 
unavailable'


Shouldn't this be handled by fam/gamin in order to avoid this overhead? 
While it does not produce notable load it prevents my processor from 
saving power as well as spinning down the disks. I will gladly provide 
more information on this if necessary. 
This is a FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE #0: Tue Jul  7 04:56:00 
CEST 2009     
root at ccschu935:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
system


Regards

Christof