Re: sticky bit, powersaving & hdd spindown
On Sun, 5 Nov 2000, Damien wrote:
> i've been working on a stand alone music player for the last couple
> of months. it's currently a bit loud (being based around an old p166
> with a very noisy hdd & powersupply fan.
>
> after reading another posting by someone else on how to quieten down
> a computer, i finally got motivated to do so. but the first problem
> that struck me was the hdd having to spin up all the time
>
> currently my music player plays a series of files off a cd. it also
> has a screen blanking option which due to the hackish nature of this
> program, does a system('tput clear') (as i don't want to use the
> ncurses routines to do this)
>
> this call to tput is located on the hard disk and cached. yet after
> playing a certain amount of music, this binary is swapped out, and
> if accessed again, the hdd would have to spin down again.
>
> i remember reading somewhere that the sticky bit could be used to
> instruct certain unixs to permanently cache a program. is this the
> case with linux? if not, can anyone offer any alternative solutions?
Under DOS there was the possibility of treating some of your RAM like a
disk (hence the name ramdisk). Not sure if Linux can do this, but if
so, then just copy the binary to a ramdisk and run it from there.
Just an idea, I don't know how to do it or even if it can be done.
Damian Menscher
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