From: Sidik Isani <isani@cfht.hawaii.edu>
Message-Id: <200110021755.HAA11523@otto.cfht.hawaii.edu>
Subject: Re: XFS on laptops
To: kaos@melbourne.sgi.com (Keith Owens)
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 07:55:03 -1000 (HST)
Cc: linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com
In-Reply-To: <8064.1001554820@kao2.melbourne.sgi.com> from "Keith Owens" at Sep 27, 2001 11:40:20 AM
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<Keith Owens wrote:>
|
|Can anybody recommend tuning parameters for XFS on laptops?  Since
|converting my laptop to XFS, the disk never spins down so the machine
|never suspends.

Hello Keith -

  Aren't suspend and disk spin-down controlled separately?

  I've been running the following on my laptop with great
  results ever since July 5th:

  o linux-2.4.6-xfs-07052001 - Uni-processor
    I don't remember exactly why I didn't go with 2.4.5-xfs-1.0.1,
    but it may have been that 2.4.6 helped somehow with letting
    the disk spin down.  I may be switching back to 2.4.5 soon so
    I'll find out.
  o /tmp and /var are "tmpfs"
  o /dev is "devfs"
  o / is "xfs" but mounted "noatime,osyncisdsync"
    * mount -o remount,noatime did NOT work with the versions I tried.
    * The standard initrd method (including a /linuxrc) does NOT work
      because of the way Linux treats the special name "/linuxrc".
    * So init must be something other than /linuxrc, and init
      itself must do the mount and use the new pivot_root stuff,
      and exec the real /sbin/init so that init still gets PID 1.
      It's the only thing which worked for getting root mounted
      with the special options.
  o I cat a bunch of things to /dev/null at the end of sysinit,
    including complete files from /lib /usr/lib /usr/X11R6/lib
  o I set spindown time to 90 seconds with hdparm (maybe a bit short)
  o ~/.netscape/history.dat is a symlink to a file in /tmp
    netscape's caches are turned off.
  o I don't run noflushd, but the disk still spins down if
    I'm not doing anything on the machine, or using it as an
    X-Terminal.

  I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but those were the key
  elements to keeping the disk quiet.

Be seeing you,

- Sidik