saving battery by syncing less

[Etienne Favey <laptop@ion-ch.ch>]

Hoi one and all,

I just recently got a Dell Latitude LS, which makes me subscribe to this list.
I am running potato on it, and Kernel 2.2.16. :-)))

Situation:
   The Battery-Savings-Howto mentions something about starting bdflush/update
   with a less frequent rate. My laptop apparently does some HD activity
   everytime I sync it. (I can her it scratch) As the kupdate does syncing
   regularly, this make my HD never spin down to save battery power.

   With older kernels (2.0.xx) update did this jobs as a separate program
   where one could supply it with command line params telling it to do it
   not so often. With newer kernels, this is no longer the case, as kupdate
   is directly built into the kernel.

Question:
   How can I tell the kernel to sync less frequently?
   I did not find any clue neither in the kernel documentation nor in
   the docu of the old update program. I could not even find anything
   called update or bdflush in the kernel sources, that would give me
   a clue.

Cheers, Etienne