constant disk activity in antiX21 runit

[Member seriousness]

Good morning,

conky shows a slight, constant hdd activity of 40 – 70 K(Byte/sec???). iotop shows the culprits are “runsv acpi-support” and “runsv sudo”. I guess disabling these two services is not a good idea – is there a way to stop them constantly accessing hdd?

Both services are down:

$ sudo sv status acpi-support 
down: acpi-support: 0s, normally up, want up

$ sudo sv status sudo 
down: sudo: 1s, normally up, want up

• This topic was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by seriousness.

[Member seriousness]

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I disabled both services using runit-service-manager.sh and disk activity goes to 0B when hdd is idle.

What confuses me:

$ ll /etc/sv/acpi-support/
insgesamt 12K
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4,0K 29. Nov 10:16 .
drwxr-xr-x 34 root root 4,0K  4. Nov 10:38 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    0 29. Nov 10:16 down
drwx------  2 root root 4,0K 29. Nov 10:16 supervise

$ ll /etc/sv/sudo/
insgesamt 12K
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4,0K 29. Nov 10:18 .
drwxr-xr-x 34 root root 4,0K  4. Nov 10:38 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    0 29. Nov 10:18 down
drwx------  2 root root 4,0K 29. Nov 10:18 supervise

there are no “run” and “finish” scripts…

[Member ModdIt]

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My disks are running hot enough to boil coffee through the constant activity.
Samsung will love the life reduction of SSD, toshiba same for my rotating drive.

Writes at present constant and move from 60 to between 90 and 100K.

64 bit antiX21 fully updated.

sudo sv status acpi-support
[sudo] Passwort für herold:
down: acpi-support: 0s, normally up, want up

Have not touched runit settings on this installation.
Surely acpi should be running as standard ?.
The screenshot is incomplete, Forum software strikes again

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by ModdIt.

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[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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seriousness wrote:

What confuses me:

there are no “run” and “finish” scripts…

Correct. You will have to write or find your own.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member ModdIt]

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Looking in HTOP is very informative as to why the constant disk activity occurs.

Have to help users best i can before we go in to total lockdown, probably sooner than later.

Will abandon the runit version, at least for now. Will also pull test user off that
before her SSD gets killed.

I am writing this from a live sysv setup, 0B disk writes over longer period.

[Member dirkd]

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I see the same thing here (disk activity). Is this something I should be worried about? I’m using Runit Antix21 as my main working system these days. And what are the consequences of disabling the acpi-support service? I don’t notice any difference at first sight, wether it is enabled or disabled…

[Member ModdIt]

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1 write about every 2 seconds, 43000 ca every 24 hours, depending on usage that is a lot of writes a year,
The majority of which are due to the way runit is setup, as expected in early days it is not perfect.

htop will show the processes
you can install and use iotop to see write activity

The sysv version I am using now does not have the disk write activity, Millions of writes a year
saved. With my usage case probably a lot more.

To me it looked like acpi is not running, my HDD never spinning down.

My move was also due to freezing which may be related in some way to the hardware, sysV setup is on same
hardware same software installed but stable for about 25 hours. I expect it will stay the same.
Had also worried about possible hardware defect as cause.

[Member olsztyn]

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ModdIt wrote:

1 write about every 2 seconds, 43000 ca every 24 hours, depending on usage that is a lot of writes a year,
The majority of which are due to the way runit is setup, as expected in early days it is not perfect.

Interesting case to identify what is causing this disk activity and resolve it but attributing this to ‘the way runit is setup’ appears to me a pure jumping to conclusion before appropriate analysis is properly conducted.
I have Runit 21 running on 5-6 laptops with variety of hardware, from Core2duo to i7, different models and I do not see any disk activity on iotop when idle. Continuous zero regardless of loop interval chosen for iotop.
Since my runit setup is the same, as comes with the official release, this appears to exclude this as cause based on such observation.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I agree; if runit is inefficient in any way I have not found it yet and I have antiX 21 Base runit installed on 3 old laptops and a 4th desktop without encountering problems on any of them. Granted, my use cases are modest, mostly simple Web browsing, usually with either Email clients, forums or tech sites. Still, if the scheduler was introducing constant writing, especially on old systems with noisy hard drives I’d notice… No problem here.

--
Brian Masinick

[Member Xecure]

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This is related to the antiX installer, that mirrors the MX installer, and creates services that are not there without first checking. I wouldn’t blame antiX runit.

About the services:
sudo runit service should not exist at all. antiX’s runit-core already has that script running at boot before runit services start, so please, everyone remove the sudo service using rnit-service-manager.sh

acpi-support service is not needed when using elogind. When using elogind, it will take control of power buttons, lid switch, etc. acpi-support was what was used before systemd’s logind was created. It now is completely incmpatible with elogind (except if you set to “ignore” all power button switches in /etc/elogind/logind.conf).
You can also remove this service with runit-service-manager.sh. If anyone needs it and doesn’t want elogind to control power-button related acpi-events, this is the service I created for myself.

run file:

$ cat /etc/sv/acpi-support/run
#!/usr/bin/env /lib/runit/invoke-run
set -e

NAME="acpi-support"
DAEMON=/etc/acpi/power.sh

# Exit service if DAEMON is not installed
if [ ! -x $DAEMON ]; then
	exit 161
fi

# start elogind if it hasn't already
if [ -r /lib/runit/invoke-depend ]; then
    . /lib/runit/invoke-depend
    start_dependency elogind
else
    sv start elogind && sv check elogind || true
fi

# Exit if missing libraries
[ -f  /usr/share/acpi-support/power-funcs ] || exit 161
. /usr/share/acpi-support/power-funcs
[ -d  /var/lib/acpi-support ] || exit 161

# Start acpi-support
on_ac_power
if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then 
	/etc/acpi/power.sh true
fi
# Source everything in /etc/acpi/start.d/
for SCRIPT in /etc/acpi/start.d/*.sh; do
	if [ -f "$SCRIPT" ] ; then
		"$SCRIPT"
	fi
done

exec 2>&1

exec chpst -b $NAME pause

finish file:

$ cat /etc/sv/acpi-support/finish
#!/bin/sh
set -e

. /usr/share/acpi-support/power-funcs

on_ac_power
if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then 
	/etc/acpi/power.sh false
fi
    
. /lib/runit/finish-default "$@"

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member ModdIt]

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@xecure Thanks for figuring out the how and why as well as fix.

I think nobody was blaming antiX runit, I said somehow related, that came after
seeing which services were trying to write logfiles, and not knowing they should
not have been running in the first place.

Installer related, I was thinking of reinstalling a Beta as thinking I was either
going even more insane and dement or the problem was not there during testing.

Also thanks for taking these reports and experiences seriously, these threads are not
about knocking or blaming, neither antiX, the work of the devs or anticapitalista for
whom I have the greatest respect, that statement is for you too.

They are also not there for trying to make those reporting problems appear like idiots
to others less involved but reading the posts.

[Member mcpderez]

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Xecure wrote:

This is related to the antiX installer, that mirrors the MX installer, and creates services that are not there without first checking.

So it’s a bug in the gazelle-installer? There don’t seem to be any open issues at https://github.com/gazelle-installer/gazelle-installer/issues — is there somewhere else gazelle-installer bugs are tracked? (I think I know another one but wanted to research if it is already known before opening a thread.)

I had also noticed this constant disk activity when trying the antiX-21 x64 full install on a Dell Latitude E6420, was fearful for my SSD and went back to the sysvinit version. When the installer is fixed, could the release notes mention this fix?

Thanks everyone for outlining the tools you used to look into this. I learned something about how to investigate issues like this for myself.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by mcpderez. Reason: spelling

[Member ModdIt]

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regarding installer, maybe not right place but we have no installer specific
thread
Yesterday the gazelle installer broke a leg, crashed/froze up
on two occasions with message unmounting HDB7, was set to preserve ext 4.
End result was all data on that partition was non recoverable, except maybe
with forensic tools. I had a backup.

Only way I was able to get a working (now on sysv) install was to reformat.
Could not find any more info as to why.

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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Could people post the output of ls -la /etc/service/

And, remove all (if they exist) down files in /etc/sv/*/

Also use runit-services-manager.sh to remove all services that you do not use/need (Probably most of them).

– see Xecure’s post above

Finally, are you using slimski or slim login manager, connman or something else.

Thanks

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member olsztyn]

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Xecure wrote:

This is related to the antiX installer, that mirrors the MX installer, and creates services that are not there without first checking. I wouldn’t blame antiX runit.

Thank you Xecure for figuring this out and providing details. I do not use gazelle installer so I am not affected but I am looking forward to resolution of all these troubles some people have.
Understandably this my note does not contribute anything to resolution, just want to express my personal appreciation…

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

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