[Techtalk] battery life+kupdated+noflushd+devfs+2.4.20-9 (RH9)=much pulling of hair

[Mary]

On Mon, May 12, 2003, Eeva J?rvinen wrote:
> I want the hd on my laptop to spin down when idle.  hdparm
> theoretically does this, but since kernel is flushing buffers (at very
> least access times) every five seconds or so, this spindown never
> happens (ok, it does happen if no-one's logged in.  Some help,
> sheesh).  Usually, my laptop doesn't swap very much at all (I use
> mostly small-footprint apps), so I think having the disk spin down
> after say, five minutes of inactivity, would help battery life a lot.

Are you using the ext3 filesystem? I'm wondering because the "flush
every five secs" behaviour sounds like ext3. People sometimes recommend
other filesystems for laptops for this reason. However, changing
filesystems is an absolute pain (copy the data somewhere else, reformat
the drive, copy it back).

> What do I do?  Should I roll my own kernel from the very newest
> sources from goodness knows where, or am I missing something very
> basic?  Or is there an easier way of making kupdated behave of a
> laptop?  

I have no idea if you want to go to the hassle of changing distros, but
I believe Mandrake uses devfs in its stock kernel. You may want to
consult documentation on that before switching, even if you decide it
would be worth it.

Others may have suggestions.

-Mary