From owner-freebsd-mobile Tue Feb 3 09:25:06 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id JAA29255 for freebsd-mobile-outgoing; Tue, 3 Feb 1998 09:25:06 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from jli.com (jli.com [199.2.111.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id JAA29250 for ; Tue, 3 Feb 1998 09:25:04 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from trost@cloud.rain.com) Received: (qmail 6698 invoked by uid 4); 3 Feb 1998 17:24:24 -0000 Message-ID: <19980203172424.6694.qmail@jli.com> Received: (qmail 21436 invoked from network); 3 Feb 1998 17:23:52 -0000 Received: from softdnserror (127.0.0.1) by softdnserror with SMTP; 3 Feb 1998 17:23:52 -0000 To: John Goerzen cc: mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hard drive not spinning down References: In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 03 Feb 1998 10:05:50 CST. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <21432.886526601.1@cloud.rain.com> Date: Tue, 03 Feb 1998 09:23:22 -0800 From: Bill Trost Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org X-To-Unsubscribe: mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" John Goerzen writes: I have been noticing that the hard drive doesn't spin down like it should. I have already taken the steps of setting async and noatime to all the filesystems, so mere reads will not cause the hard drive to spin up if the data is already in its cache. I doubt that async is gaining you anything -- is I understand it, all it does is loosen the constraints on the order of disk write operations. It is more likely to cause you grief the next time you have a crash (say, due to low battery? NAAAH). I like the noatime idea, though. I have turned off sendmail's automatic queue runs and the only other things going were X, fvwm2, and some xterms -- all of which were running telnets that were logged in to a remote machine. This isn't a big problem but it is a strange one. Well, it was something I wanted to discuss anyhow, so thanks for bringing it up. I was having similar problems, so I went searching the disks for possible offenders. Things I discovered: 1. History files tend to get written every time I hit enter. Not good. I squashed some of them, but don't know what to do about the rest. 2. Cron logs (in /var/cron/log) everything it tries to run, and mgetty's faxrunq was going off fairly frequently (which also writes a file when it runs). Too bad cron(8) doesn't indicate what priorities are used for what sorts of messages (I mean, the man pages *I* write tell you absolutely everything you want to know, they're perfect, uh-huh...). 3. Two modtimes in /dev are updated every time you type a line (character?) at an xterm. I assume these have to get written out at some point, but FFS might be willing to let them sit and stew. Maybe laptops should build /dev in an mfs partition???? If anyone else has ideas on how to keep FreeBSD from touching the disk, I'd love to hear them. On the other hand, Lose'95 is worse than FreeBSD for me at this point, so I'm not *too* worried.