[PVE-User] pvestatd: exclude ZFS pool from being read

[René Mayrhofer]

Hi everybody,

I am testing a Proxmox VE installation on a custom-made server with 32
GB RAM (Celeron G3900), SSD for the system installation (including ZIL
and ARC2 for ZFS on separate partitions), and 4 disks (Seagate NAS) in
ZFS RAID-Z1 configuration. The ZFS pool(s) should be used for large data
repositories that are not used continuously, and the aim is therefore to
spin down all disks whenever possible. VM disk images should be put onto
the SSD (potentially also on another ZFS pool instead of LVM for
efficient zfs send/receive), with snapshots mirrored to the ZFS pool on
a regular basis (e.g. daily).

My current problem is that in the default installation with a manually
created ZFS pool, hd-idle or on-disk settings will not let the platter
spin down. I have tracked it down to pvestatd - stopping the daemon will
immediately let the disks spin down (if no VM is running from that pool
and no file-level access happens either, of course). hd-idle shows
regular read requests (no writes) to the disks when pvestatd is running,
preventing them from spinning down.

Unfortunately, I didn't find any documentation on how to configure
pvestatd (manual pages, first web searches, etc.). How can I tell
pvestatd to exclude that ZFS pool from its regular scans or to only read
meta-data (e.g. zfs list or zpool iostat -v will return free space on
the pool without touching the disks)? I

best regards,
Rene