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pmud options quirk



Hi all,

I've recently gotten a new HD for my TiBook (40 Gig :), which makes
relatively loud noise when moving the head.

At first, it did that every five seconds, which, as you can imagine, is
unsupportable after a few minutes.

I've since tried to find what accesses the disk every five seconds, and
come to the combination pmud with APM emulation/asapm.

Now to the problem I found with pmud:

- To start with, is it normal that the disk accesses the on-disk data
  for the FIFO _that_ often? It seems both pmud and asapm are configured
  with 1 second intervals for writing/reading the FIFO.

- My first thought was to move the APM emulation FIFO out of /etc/power
  onto a tmpfs partition. File in memory; no disk access needed... But
  trying to do that I've found a weird behaviour with pmud's options:

  Specifying 'pmud -a /tmpfs/apm' just silently ignores option '-a'.
  Recompiling pmud from source with some debug printk's proved that. The
  solution was to remove the space between '-a' and the argument.

  Normal? Bug in pmud? Bug in getopt_long()?

While we're at it, does anybody have other ideas to eliminate disk
acceses? I've already done these:

- switch back to ext2 from ext3 (ext3 prevents the HD from spinning
  down)
- install noflushd
- tune the bdflush parameters in /proc/sys/vm
- remount with noatime while on battery

In particular, how about devfs? I'd suppose having devfs in memory saves
the atime/ctime/mtime changes on the /dev FS nodes (which is metadata to
the FS, right?)?

Cheers, and thanks for any comments

Michel

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michel Lanners                 |  " Read Philosophy.  Study Art.
23, Rue Paul Henkes            |    Ask Questions.  Make Mistakes.
L-1710 Luxembourg              |
email   mlan@cpu.lu            |
http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan        |                     Learn Always. "


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