From owner-freebsd-mobile  Sun Feb 11 14:11:14 2001
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To: mobile@freebsd.org
Subject: Any ideas on keeping the disk spun down on laptop
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 14:11:12 -0800
From: "Kevin Oberman" <oberman@es.net>
Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG
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X-Loop: FreeBSD.org

One annoyance I have with FreeBSD on my laptop is that the disk will
spin up on a frequent basis, even when the system seems completely
idle. I suspect that this is the result of update(4).

The man page claims that I can extend the period between updates with
sysctl kern.update. But, when I try a "sysctl kern.update", I get a
response of:
sysctl: unknown oid 'kern.update'

Has anyone looked into making update(4) not do any disk IO when there
have been no changes to metadata? And, is there a way to extend the
update period? Or am I completely off base in my belief that update(4)
is the source of the continuing disk accesses.

FWIW, I am running with soft-updates on all file systems. This could well
impact things.

Thanks,

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman@es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634


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