Re: [PATCH RFC] sd: spin down disks on removal or power-down

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Mon Jan 29 2007 - 19:41:28 EST


James Bottomley wrote:
On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 15:47 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
What we don't want to happen is for those disks to spin down during a
reboot.
It seems that this is OK with this patch.

Also, we probably don't want them to be spun down during a kexec_load,
but
I expect that's OK too.

Actually, there's another case where we don't want to do spin down, and
that's when we don't own the disc (think external array on a SAN).
Telling this has always been the biggest stumbling block to spin down of
SCSI devices.

There's a patch similar to yours which takes this into account, which is
currently under discussion:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=116922621200002

It looks like Tejun's patch essentially does the same thing as mine with the addition of the control from userspace. There is one exception though, my patch also does the stop on removal of the SCSI disk (i.e. writing 1 to its "delete" file in sysfs, what scsiadd -r does). I think it makes sense if the user selected the disk to be spun down on shutdown to do it on removal as well, as it is potentially about to be physically removed/powered down (especially for USB or FireWire disks).

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

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