[ltp] A21m won't park /dev/hda

[ben knight]

Tom:

noflushd's job is to cause the disk to spin down until it's physically
needed, at the slight expense of data security. If something's been
written to the 'disk', noflushd doesn't bother to let the HDD spin up -
the data can be truly written next time the disk is spinning anyway.
However, if you need to read data, and the data isn't in one of the
buffers in RAM, the disk *does* need to spin up to retrieve the data. 

> After I sent this first email out I did two things:
> killed the debugging on kdm (should have done that when I got it working 
> a month ago..)
> and then I killed konquerer and started playing some game.
> Then the disk parked!

It would seem that either the kde debugging or konq is reading from the
disk, as you found out. Hence, noflushd wasn't of much use.

> I have to do some more reading again and will keep my ears open.   But 
> this PC (with an ultra-bay battery) was able to get >7 hours of use on a 
> charge.  Now I'm down to 4 hours on a good day.

7hrs! wow. 

> I've turned of irda, unloaded my pcmcia card in hopes of helping this. 
> But it seems that the power savings has taken a turn for the worse on 
> this installation.

Have you tried mucking around with tpctl? Clock speed of the processor
seems to make quite a difference to battery life. If you need the full
speed of the processor at times, tpctl comes with apmiser, which will
automatically switch cpu speed, based on requiurements, moment to
moment.

You may also want to look at LCD brightness, CD/DVD usage, NIC usage,
and power to other peripherals.

Hopefully, some of this will help you somewhere .... :)

/b

bkk@ozemail.com.au
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