filesystem writing inodes when it oughtn't?

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 03:53:22PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> 
>       2) About 200 xfers/sec (about 3MB/sec worth) is still going on
>          to the SSD for much of the build process.  It's all writes.
>          All build directories (obj, dest, tools, release) are on
>          a separate tmpfs, /tmp is on tmpfs, the machine isn't
>          using any swap, and I am building with -U -O.  By the time I
>          verified all this, the disk writes were done so I couldn't
>          use fstat to see what files might be being written.

I cannot find anything relevant open in / for write while this is going
on (/ is the SSD on this system).  The filesystem is mounted noatime,
nodevmtime, but I suspect it's having metadata written out when it shouldn't
anyway.  I note that others have reported laptop disks spinning up recently
for no obvious reason...

Thor