Mailing List Archive

On 10/12/2004 06:45 PM, Grant wrote:
> I'd like to keep my workstation's disc accesses to a bare minimum so I
> can keep the hard drive spun down as much as possible. Are there any
> tweaks that can help with that?
>
> - Grant
>
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
Besides laptop-mode you could install
sys-apps/noflushd on your system.

Jochen

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> > I'd like to keep my workstation's disc accesses to a bare minimum so I
> > can keep the hard drive spun down as much as possible. Are there any
> > tweaks that can help with that?
> >
> > - Grant
> >
> > --
> > gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
> >
> >
> Besides laptop-mode you could install
> sys-apps/noflushd on your system.
>
> Jochen

noflushd looks great, but they say it doesn't work as well with
journaled filesystems like ext3. I'm giving it a try anyway, and the
daemon has started successfully, but it never spins down the drive.
I'm trying to subscribe to their list for some help.

- Grant

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> > I'd like to keep my workstation's disc accesses to a bare minimum so
> > I can keep the hard drive spun down as much as possible. Are there
> > any tweaks that can help with that?
> >
> > - Grant
> >
>
> Hi,
> you can try laptop mode when you are on kernel 2.6
>
> http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/laptop_mode/

Does laptop mode work well with journaling filesystems?

- Grant

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On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 11:26:55 -0700, Grant wrote:

> noflushd looks great, but they say it doesn't work as well with journaled
> filesystems like ext3. I'm giving it a try anyway, and the daemon has

That's mostly outdated documentation. I've been using it with ext3 for >2
years now without any problems at all. If you're using reiserfs it'll
probably burn your house down.

> started successfully, but it never spins down the drive. I'm trying to

Getting / to spin down is difficult because of cron and logfiles in
/var/log/ (syslog & friends). If you prefix the syslog files with a dash
(-/var/log/foo.log) they won't be synced after each write, but that also
means that in case of a panic you might lose the last line or so. Also,
make sure to mount everything with noatime since this prevents unnecessary
metadata updates just because something has been served from the fs buffer
cache.

If you have SCSI drives you really need to twiddle with latest version
(2.7.4) which is not in portage (why?). It works perfectly for external
FireWire drives but NOT for external USB drives (at least not for me and I
tried _hard_ ;) - I suspect the usb_storage driver just does not implement
the necessary sleep/wakeup commands.

-h



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> > noflushd looks great, but they say it doesn't work as well with journaled
> > filesystems like ext3. I'm giving it a try anyway, and the daemon has
>
> That's mostly outdated documentation. I've been using it with ext3 for >2
> years now without any problems at all. If you're using reiserfs it'll
> probably burn your house down.

I did see those reiserfs warnings. I'm using ext3.

>
> > started successfully, but it never spins down the drive. I'm trying to
>
> Getting / to spin down is difficult because of cron and logfiles in
> /var/log/ (syslog & friends). If you prefix the syslog files with a dash
> (-/var/log/foo.log) they won't be synced after each write, but that also
> means that in case of a panic you might lose the last line or so. Also,
> make sure to mount everything with noatime since this prevents unnecessary
> metadata updates just because something has been served from the fs buffer
> cache.

/ and /boot are mounted with noatime. I don't need that for the swap
partition do I?

When I use 'hdparm -y /dev/hda' to spin it down, it doesn't come back
up for a bit. That makes me think I've got enough inactivity for
noflushd to be kicking in.

>
> If you have SCSI drives you really need to twiddle with latest version
> (2.7.4) which is not in portage (why?). It works perfectly for external
> FireWire drives but NOT for external USB drives (at least not for me and I
> tried _hard_ ;) - I suspect the usb_storage driver just does not implement
> the necessary sleep/wakeup commands.
>

Just one internal IDE notebook drive.

- Grant

> -h

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