Re: Which filesystem for a notebook?
On 11 Apr 2002, Mark Janssen wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-04-11 at 13:22, Michal Frackowiak wrote:
> > Mark Janssen wrote:
> >
> > >On Thu, 2002-04-11 at 13:02, Michal Frackowiak wrote:
> > >If you want more battery life, stick with ext2, since the journaling
> > >filesystems keep the harddisk spinning all the time.
> > >
> > No way to stop it? No standby?
>
> Sure you can go to suspend... but when not suspended the disk will spin
> up every 5-15 seconds to write journal data.
>
> Using ext2 and noflushd you can hold this back. this doesn't work for
> ext3 and reiser.
I did manage to stop the spinning up for ext3. First, do the old trick of
mounting the fs's with noatime (because all writes still go through
straight away), then download the noflushd source. It has been a while,
but I think noflush tries to stop kupdated or something, but this does not
exist in kernel 2.4. But a similar named process does exist (kupdate,
without the d, or vice-versa). Change all occurences of kupdated with
kupdate (or vice versa) in noflushd (including the /etc/rc*.d scripts),
recompile, and voila. Now maybe, there needs to be at least one partition
that is ext2, rather than ext3 - frankly, I can't remember (both my laptop
and desktop are at home, where I haven't downloaded that innernet thingie
:) - that way the kupdate kernel thread is actually running, so there is
something to stop and take over. But I could be talking out of my arse
here.
Now, if I haven't missed anything (entirely unlikely), your disks should
spin down, as long as you don't write to them (writes take immediate
effect - they are not allowed to stay around in the cache for long)
<snip flaky hardware and heat related stuffs>
> It's been running all night (downloading news) and all day now, usually
> it wouln't have survived that... now it's still going strong :)
Gosh, you make it sound like that is amazing. Thank goodness I have stable
hardware. What machine is it? Dells have the i8k utility to control the
fan, and toshibas have something similar. 'apt-cache search fan' might
help you (damn I hate not having a linux box with root connected to the
net).
--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
>Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
You're saying cats are the opposite of bijectiveness?
-- ST in RHOD
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