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    SubjectRe: faster boots?
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    Itai Nahshon wrote:
    > On Saturday 06 April 2002 02:07 am, Benjamin LaHaise wrote:
    > > On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 02:02:36AM +0300, Itai Nahshon wrote:
    > > > A required feature IMHO: there should _never_ be dirty blocks
    > > > for disks that are not spinning.
    > >
    > > Never make assertions like that: on my laptop, I want *lots* of
    > > dirty blocks held in memory while the disk isn't spinning. Keeping
    > > RAM powered is much less costly than spinning the disk up.
    > >
    > > -ben
    >
    > I figure that if there are dirty blocks that belong to files that you
    > want to keep, they must be flushed at some time, probably on the
    > next sync(). On "normal" systems that's likely to happen in less
    > than a minute.
    >
    > I admit that what I had in mind was medium-large systems with
    > multiple disks where some of the disks have very little activity
    > or small systems where there is really zero disk activity for
    > a long time.
    >
    > I'm curios, how much work can you accomplish on your laptop
    > without any disk access (but you still need to save files - keeping
    > them in buffers until it's time to actually write them).

    On a laptop you can decide to "trust" the drive to spin up, just
    because the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

    The benefit may be: Battery life becomes 8 hours instead of 4. That
    might mean that you get 4 hours of extra work done while travelling at
    $100 per hour....

    Just editing source-code using VI, or reading docs can leave your
    disk completely idle for hours at a time.

    Debugging an app, compiling testing, recompiling can leave your disk
    idle provided you accept dirty blocks in the buffer cache...


    Roger.

    --
    ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 **
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