[lug] laptop mode thinkering (2.6.6 kernel)

[Ferdinand Schmid]

HI,

Are you simply looking for ACPI to turn off your hard drive?  I didn't realize
this was difficult at all.  On SuSE 9.1 it just happens (kernel
2.6.4-54.5-default).  I can't find any spindown rpm...  

FYI - I am running JFS on my root partition and XFS on my home partition.

If I can make it to hacking society on Tursday I'll be happy to let you poke
around my laptop to see how this is implemented on my laptop.

Ferdinand

--On Tuesday, May 18, 2004 10:14:12 AM -0600 Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com>
wrote:

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> Since I am running the 2.6.6 kernel on my laptop now, I decided to
> take a look at http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/laptop_mode/ since it's
> included in the kernel now. The laptop-mode.txt readme that comes with
> the kernel has the approprate scripts in it, so I copied out the
> /sbin/laptop-mode script and ran it.
> 
> I saw no mention of JFS support in the readme or the script however
> (my laptop uses JFS), so decided to go look on the net. The
> laptop_mode page does say that JFS is supported, but thats it. Digging
> around on google got me a discussion about JFS and laptop mode on the
> JFS list. Looks like JFS didn't need any modifications to work with
> laptop mode, it just works. So, then I did a '/sbin/laptop-mode start'
> and a 'hdparm -S 4 /dev/hda' to set the spindown time on my drive low
> and start laptop mode. Nothing happened.
> 
> To figure out what was keeping my drive spun up, I used: "echo 1 >
> /proc/sys/vm/block_dump". That spews out every process that hits the
> disk and if it's a read/write or a cache hit. Using that I fixed a few
> things: Set syslog to not sync after each log (a - before the
> filename), closed some firefox windows that were autorefreshing and
> writing to cache, setup syslog not to log my fetchnews jobs on each
> run. 
> 
> Tried laptop mode again, but it still wouldn't spin down. The
> drive was inactive as far as I could tell. Perhaps it's an issue with
> my drive somehow, so I looked around a bit more and pulled down 
> http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/smart_spindown/
> which is a handy script that checks for activity and then spins down
> your drive if there isn't any. It has backoff so that if things seem
> busy it will wait longer and longer to spin it down. Using that script
> things spun down and appeared to work ok. Running it overnight I was
> able to see up to about 10min of spin down time at various points,
> sometimes as little as 30 seconds. I think this might be worth the
> savings if you were really hurting for power, but otherwise seems
> kinda pointless.
> 
> kevin
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--
Ferdinand Schmid
Architectural Energy Corporation
Celebrating over 20 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
http://www.archenergy.com