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Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile Has anyone looked into some simple power management on the webpal. I have a webpal acting as a file server at home, but it's unused probably 23 hours a day. I'm interested in being able to tell the attached IDE hard drive to sleep to eliminate noise from it (and maybe save wear & tear on a hard drive that is already probably 5 years old) Anyone tried something like this? The PC equivalents of APM and ACPI don't look like they would even remotely apply, so I'm not sure where to start. PS. Anyone with an IDE hard drive care to tell me how theirs behaves? My system is constantly accessing the HDD in very brief spurts, even when the system has been idle for hours. Is this normal? Do I have something configured wrong? Thanks in advance, Mike 12-21-2003 20:49:20

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile I downloaded and installed hdparm, which is supposed to be able to issue commands to EIDE hard drives. When I issue a suspend or sleep command to my hard drive, the system wakes it up only a few seconds later to do one of its incessant reads or writes. Where does this behavior come from? I am running debian potato, with a SAMBA 3.0 share. These read/writes occur whether or not anyone is connected to the share. Is it writing updates to the DATE or something? Any insight would be appreciated. Mike 12-22-2003 11:51:12

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile Here are the processes that are running when I use telnet to remotely log in and check on the box. I have individully killed portmap, syslogd, klogd, inetd, lpd, smbd, nmbd, and the tty's, but that seems to have no effect on the HD accessing. STAT TIME COMMAND S 0:07 init SW 0:00 [keventd] SWN 0:00 [ksoftirqd_CPU0] SW 0:00 [kswapd] SW 0:00 [bdflush] SW 0:00 [kupdated] SW 0:00 [mtdblockd] S 0:00 /sbin/portmap S 0:01 /sbin/syslogd S 0:00 /sbin/klogd S 0:00 /usr/sbin/inetd S 0:00 /usr/sbin/lpd S 0:00 /usr/sbin/lpd S 0:00 /usr/local/samba/bin/smbd -D S 0:06 /usr/local/samba/bin/nmbd -D S 0:00 /usr/local/samba/bin/nmbd -D S 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty1 S 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty2 S 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty3 S 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty4 S 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty5 S 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty6 S 0:00 in.telnetd: 192.168.0.2 S 0:00 -bash S 0:00 bash R 0:01 ps ax 12-23-2003 11:56:33

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) newell Profile You might try running lsof (LiSt Open Files) and see what processes are keeping files open and active. Are you using swap? If so, adding physical memory might help. 12-23-2003 19:32:59

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile I don't think swap is active (newbie note, how do I check?), and this seems too frequent and too small to be swapping memory. I am running in console mode (don't need xwindows for a 'headless' network box) and have 16MB of memory (a 32MB 4k refresh SIMM). I ran lsof, but I don't think I am any closer to finding the problem (perhaps when I run lsof, the file that keeps getting accessed is temporarily not accessed?). Is there a utility that does real time monitoring of file read/writes? On a side note, is there any way to mount the 352K "root" partition of the flash SIMM once I have mounted an IDE drive as my root file system? I don't see a /dev/mtdblock entry in /dev, so mount returns the message "mount: special device /dev/mtdblock does not exist" when I try mount /dev/mtdblock -t cramfs /flash Thanks for the help. Mike 12-25-2003 22:38:38

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile Turns out it WAS probably inetd or one of the Samba daemons that kept waking the hard drive. Just need to figure out now how to move the files they keep accessing off the hard drive to a ramdisk or the flash partition. How do you mount the flash partition if you are running root from a hard drive? 12-27-2003 08:44:09

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) ranma Profile Have a look at noflushd, I have it running on my notebook and it works quite well, it supresses some kernel behaviour that would spin up the disk at regular intervals. http://noflushd.sf.net/ 01-09-2004 23:18:01

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile Thanks for the suggestion. It looks promising. Earlier I moved a number of the configuration and lock files for Samba and Inetd to a ramfs, but it still didn't seem to do the trick. I will look at this to see if it takes care of it. BTW, I don't suppose you have a pre-compiled ARM binary sitting around nearby, do you? -*sheepish grin*- /me starts looking around Justdavesj's website for webpal native gcc... 01-13-2004 15:37:25

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) justdavesj Profile | Email I've posted the binary for noflushd on my ftp site. dave 01-14-2004 15:45:51

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile Dave, you are a champ! Do you have any other goal in life than to satisfy my every linuz need? Thanks a dozen yet again. Mike 01-15-2004 08:08:49

RE:Power management / hard drive sleep? (modified 0 times) oninesm Profile noflushd did EXACTLY what I was looking for. Using it I can get my webpal hard drive to spind down once I'm done using it for a while, and it will stay quiet until the next time I need it. Thanks for the pointer. 01-18-2004 22:44:04

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