Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: faster boots? | Date | Mon, 8 Apr 2002 14:09:29 +0200 (MEST) | From | (Rogier Wolff) |
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Itai Nahshon wrote: > On Saturday 06 April 2002 02:07 am, Benjamin LaHaise wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 02:02:36AM +0300, Itai Nahshon wrote: > > > A required feature IMHO: there should _never_ be dirty blocks > > > for disks that are not spinning. > > > > Never make assertions like that: on my laptop, I want *lots* of > > dirty blocks held in memory while the disk isn't spinning. Keeping > > RAM powered is much less costly than spinning the disk up. > > > > -ben > > I figure that if there are dirty blocks that belong to files that you > want to keep, they must be flushed at some time, probably on the > next sync(). On "normal" systems that's likely to happen in less > than a minute. > > I admit that what I had in mind was medium-large systems with > multiple disks where some of the disks have very little activity > or small systems where there is really zero disk activity for > a long time. > > I'm curios, how much work can you accomplish on your laptop > without any disk access (but you still need to save files - keeping > them in buffers until it's time to actually write them).
On a laptop you can decide to "trust" the drive to spin up, just because the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
The benefit may be: Battery life becomes 8 hours instead of 4. That might mean that you get 4 hours of extra work done while travelling at $100 per hour....
Just editing source-code using VI, or reading docs can leave your disk completely idle for hours at a time.
Debugging an app, compiling testing, recompiling can leave your disk idle provided you accept dirty blocks in the buffer cache...
Roger.
-- ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 ** *-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --* * There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. * There are also old, bald pilots. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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