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Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 11:16:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
To: Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca>
cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: faster boots?
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On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Richard Gooch wrote:


> But I *want* to write while the drive is spun down. And leave it spun
> down until the system is RAM starved (or some threshold is reached).

  The threshold I hit is how much think time I want to risk. I have no
problem spinning down the drive after inactivity, but the idea of
investing several hours making little changes in a program or proposal
document and then maybe losing them... batteries are just not that
expensive.

  Looking at the blinking of my disk light, it *appears* that by tuning
bdflush you can get a user selected time between sweeps, and use hdparm to
spin down (I assume your laptop doesn't use SCSI!) after a minute or so.
Tuning bdflush somewhat relies on using either -aa or mainline VM, perhaps
version as well. You should be able to only flush every N minutes with any
of them, but the meaning of /sys/vm/bdflush seems somewhat dependent of
code behind it. Still, you should be able to get the behaviour you want
without making it manditory for everyone.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.

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