[plug] hard drive activity

[James Devenish]

In message <400221DA.9010904 at leftclick.com.au>
on Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 12:26:02PM +0800, Ben New wrote:
> Is there a way to find out which processes are using the hard drive/s
> (IDE)?

Easy: none of them (it's the kernel :).

A process can request various 'reads' and 'writes' from the kernel and
you would like to know, over a period of time, which processes spent the
most time reading or writing, or had the most bytes moved through such
calls. This means you want a "cross section" across a system with
already-running process, rather than merely profiling a new, individual
process. Generally, the former instrumentation requires "cooperation"
from the kernel and will induce a performance hit. So, I would suspect
that you might need to compile a kernel with options, load a special
module, or install a newish kernel version. I really don't know.