Poor disk drive performance with FC3 RC3

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 13:40 -0500, Steffen Persvold wrote:
> What is the purpose of the "haldaemon" and why is it destroying my
> system performance ?
> 

hal polls for media change on your optical drive; is your optical
drive /dev/hdb by any chance? E.g. on the same cable as /dev/hda - I've
had reports yesterday about hdparm giving bad numbers in this case.

Basically hal does this (every two seconds)

 open("/dev/hdc", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE) = 0
 ioctl(0, CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, 0x7fffffff) = 1
 close(0) 

Can some kernel person comment on why this is killing performance on
the /dev/hda harddrive when the optical drive at /dev/hdb is polled?

Cheers,
David