Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263580AbUAZKQK (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Jan 2004 05:16:10 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265173AbUAZKQK (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Jan 2004 05:16:10 -0500 Received: from rzfoobar.is-asp.com ([217.11.194.155]:61907 "EHLO mail.isg.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263580AbUAZKQH (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Jan 2004 05:16:07 -0500 Message-ID: <4014E8E6.7050007@isg.de> Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:16:06 +0100 From: Lutz Vieweg Organization: Innovative Software AG User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030721 wamcom.org X-Accept-Language: de, German, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Felipe Alfaro Solana Cc: Linux Kernel Mailinglist , adilger@clusterfs.com Subject: Re: Is there a way to keep the 2.6 kjournald from writing to idle disks? (to allow spin-downs) References: <40140B0A.90707@isg.de> <1075058769.1756.8.camel@teapot.felipe-alfaro.com> In-Reply-To: <1075058769.1756.8.camel@teapot.felipe-alfaro.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1806 Lines: 45 Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote: > On Sun, 2004-01-25 at 19:29, Lutz Vieweg wrote: > >>I run a server that usually doesn't have to do anything on the local filesystems, >>it just needs to answer some requests and perform some computations in RAM. >> >>So I use the "hdparm -S 123" parameter setting to keep the (IDE) system disk from >>spinning unneccessarily. >> >>Alas, since an upgrade to kernel 2.6 and ext3 filesystem, I cannot find a way to >>let the harddisk spin down - I found out that "kjournald" writes a few blocks every >>few seconds. >> >>As I wouldn't like to downgrade to ext2: Is there any way to keep the 2.6 kjournald >>from writing to idle disks? >> >>I cannot see a good reason why kjournald would write when there are no dirty buffers - >>but still it does. > > > Have you tried playing with the laptop-mode patch? It's already in the > -mm kernel tree from Andrew Morton. I've been playing with it a little > (just a few minutes) and seems keep the disks spun down for some time. This "laptop-mode" patch would make things far worse than they're now: Spinning up the disk about every 10min would reduce their lifetime significantly instead of extending it. It's not a laptop, but a server with an ordinary 3.5" harddisk I'm speaking about, my goal is not saving power, but spinning down a harddisk that does not need to spin up the whole day long. What I'm questioning is whether there's a need to write to idle disks at all - does anybody know why kjournald writes data even if there is nothing to commit at all? Regards, Lutz Vieweg - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/