Re: [ltp] IBM HDAPS Someone interested? (Accelerometer)

From: Alejandro Bonilla
Date: Sat Jun 25 2005 - 18:42:38 EST


Vojtech Pavlik wrote:

On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 01:13:17PM -0500, Alejandro Bonilla wrote:



I have a question here, how do you guys think that the head is parked, is it done by the controller directly, which then sends the command to the HD to park the head, or this is done by the operating system in some kind of way?

I think the OS or user space is too slow like to react to send a park command to the hard drive, so this most be done directly by the embedded controller, but still I think it needs some input from the OS, to initialize it's settings.



The only way to park a drive is to send a command to it through the IDE
interface. This can't be done by the controller itself, since the
controller in the ThinkPad is a classic Intel ICH chip which only passes
commands around.

The OS is definitely fast enough for this kind of task, it's doable even
in userspace, although not easy.



i.e. after all, in windows you do have the settings in the software
for HDAPS, but it looks like it is _not_ managed by the operating
system at all if there is some type of action to be taken. This is
also probably why HDAPS won't kick in until booted, and that is
because it needs to load its config setup by the software.





This is what I think, please correct me if I'm saying something crazy.



It is definitely all done by the windows kernel driver.



OK, So if this is done by the user space then I think we can play more with it? I guess that we could do a type of hdparm -F or hdparm -S to spin down the drive or maybe there is a way to add feature to hdparm to park the drive itself.

Aside from what we should do when we get the data... How can we/us/I start checking and see if we can find any response from the embedded controller?

Do we have to backengineer everything, can we get anything of this from IBM-ACPI, or our only way to go here is see if IBM will do anything?

Thanks for all the answers. I really don't want to drop the topic, so that we can figure this one out.

.Alejandro
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