Re: Spinning down drives

Pavel Machek (pavel@Elf.mj.gts.cz)
Sun, 6 Jul 1997 17:06:16 +0200

> I wrote:
> > Hi, all. I've trawled the configuration files for 2.0.30 and 2.1.42
> > and can't find that NO_ATIME patch I remember hearing about when
> > 2.0.30 came out. Could some kind soul tell me where it is?
> > I've got a laptop with 2.0.30 and I've set the HD spindown timeout to
> > 40 seconds, but something causes it to spin up every minute or so. I
> > presume that's the bdflush daemon. This is on a totally idle system,
> > so it doesn't quite make sense: I would have thought once buffers are
> > flushed, there is no point doing it again... Even killing off all my
> > daemons (even syslogd) doesn't help.
>
> I tried mounting filesystems with -o noatime and that didn't help. I
> then ran update (bdflush) with -f 300 to set the timeout to 5
> minutes. That worked. It still seems odd that bdflush (1, NULL) will
> write to the disc if *no process has written to the disc since the
> last call to bdflush*. Doesn't the kernel properly tag all buffers as
> clean once bdflush is done?

I have made modified version of bdflush which allows drives to
sleep. Mail me for it.

-- 

--
I'm really pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz. 	   Pavel
Look at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/ ;-).