Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: PATCH: rewritten bdflush | Date | Wed, 12 May 1999 08:49:37 -0400 | From | Zack Weinberg <> |
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On Wed, 12 May 1999 04:00:23 +0200, Marc Lehmann wrote: >On Tue, May 11, 1999 at 12:13:30PM -0400, Zack Weinberg wrote: >> >> There is one notable side effect: you don't have to run the user space >> update anymore, bdflush wakes up every so often all by itself. I > >How about notebook users who have configured update to stop writing out >buffers and spin down disks after some idle time? > >Does you patch implement something similar or do we need to spin up drives >every 5 seconds? ;)
No, the patch doesn't do anything like that. However, it seems to me that if your system really is idle, there won't be any dirty buffers to flush, and the disk will spin down anyway. It also seems to me that it is unsafe behavior to postpone flushing dirty buffers just because the disk has spun down. Finally, does anyone necessarily know when the disk is spun down? You'd need something in the disk driver, and there doesn't seem to be anything like that. The versions of update that `know' this seem to do it by looking at /proc/interrupts, which is unreliable.
zw
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