On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 03:02:55PM -0300, Rogério Brito wrote:
> On Mar 08 2004, Matijs van Zuijlen wrote:
[...]
> > I also have:
> >
> > # cat /proc/sys/vm/bdflush
> > 30 500 0 0 600000 600000 60 20 0
> >
> > This will stop the disk from spinning up every time things like gconfd,
> > chrony, or galeon (or any other web browser with crash recovery) write
> > stuff to disk (which is often).
>
> I don't have this file. I am using a 2.6 kernel. I think that the above
> applies only to Linux 2.4.
True. I'm now using a 2.6 kernel as well, and now I have:
# cat /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs
60000
# cat /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
60000
The init script in Documentation/laptop-mode.txt sets the correct
values for the 2.6 kernel as well.
> > And:
> >
> > # cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
> > 1
> >
> > This will cause the system to write all unflushed data to disk _once
> > there's a spinup_.
>
> Yes, I saw that laptop-mode is a nice thing to use, as it tries to combine
> both reads and writes in a single operation. Quite neat.
>
> > And I use noflushd with a one-minute spindown time.
>
> Ooops! I just started reading about laptop-mode in the Documentation
> directory of the Linux kernel and it says that laptop-mode should not be
> used in conjunction with noflushd---it says that laptop-mode should be used
> with hdparm instead.
Well, I wasn't aware of that, and it _was_ working fine here, until I
rebooted yesterday: there were no more spindowns. I'm using hdparm now as
well. It's a much cleaner solution, I think.
> Does anybody else have comments on getting long battery life tweaking the
> disk?
From man hdparm:
-B Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A
low value means aggressive power management and a high value means
better performance. A value of 255 will disable apm on the drive.
I'm trying it out now.
I don't know if I mentioned this already, but I use vim, and I have set it
to not flush its swap file. That helps a lot.
--
Matijs van Zuijlen
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