Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sat, 09 Sep 2000 12:11:42 +0200 | From | Tim Brunne <> | Subject | Re: Notebook disk spindown |
| |
Richard Gooch wrote:
> Jamie Lokier writes: > > Russell King wrote: > > > > With laptops, people are willing > > > > to assume the RAM is reliable -- accidentally pulling the plug out won't > > > > lose the data. > > > > > > But a buggy apm implementation and the battery running down can. > > > > Well, perhaps the risk is worth it.
> At the least, people should be able to choose whether they are willing > to take the risk or not. So a CONFIG_ option would do. > Has such a patch been submitted?
I think Jamie is right. The nice feature of the old bdflushd deamon was, that disk writes were possible without spin up of the disk, because of RAM buffering. This is achived again by patching the kernel later than 2.2.10.
In my opinion a CONFIG_ option is not necessary: In fs/buffer.c there are already *default values* and *upper limits* for relevant kernel paramters present. I just increased the upper limits *to be able* to modify kernel parameters to suit my needs. Changing the upper limits does *not* modify the default behaviour of the kernel.
So I think my tiny patch or some similar one should become part of future kernels. There may be a more reasonable choice for the upper limits. --- Unfortunately I do not know how to "officially submit" a patch, if that is what Richard means.
Regarding the proposals of Russel. It's true what you say, but also what Jamie said: I like to do some work on files in some subdirectory "xyz", doing a "cat /..../xyz/* > /dev/null" I can read, modify and write files without any hard disk running. The system doesn't crash, so everything is nice. I use the notebook a lot as a simple X-terminal without accessing the local disk, so again in principle hours of work are possible without a spinning hard disk. And I don't have to tailor a lot of deamons, etc. . A simple write to /proc/sys/vm/bdflush and calling hdparm once, both in some startup script is sufficient.
Thanks to all of you for your replies and interest!
Regards, Tim
-- patch: http://www.hmi.de/people/brunne/Spindown
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |