Re: Mysterious drive access and battery life

[Mark Williams <mkwilliams@ucdavis.edu>]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2002 22:04:08 +0100 (CET)
Michel Lanners <mlan@cpu.lu> wrote:


> Besides the usual suspects like syslog (adding a '-' in front of the
> file name doesn't sync the disk on every write), I did the following:
> 
> - tune bdflush: add to /proc/sysctl.conf:
> 
> # Tune bdflush:
> vm/bdflush = 95 5000 100 512 500 60000 30000 20 0
> 

This seemed to do the trick; The drive spins down and stays spun down. Well, it stays spun down until I click the mouse button. Things like raising a window's level and loading up a webpage in dillo or galeon (the latter of which is configured to have no disk cache) will also spin up the drive? Any ideas? I set up /dev fs and /tmp as tmpfs:

mrw@pinax:~$ mount
/dev/hda11 on / type ext2 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,size=20M,mode=1777)

Wild stuff, eh?

Thanks for your time, everyone!

-Mark