| 1 |
Hi folks, |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
I've got an Asus X7BJ-something laptop here that by default (i.e. when |
| 4 |
installing plain Gentoo on it) seems to do too aggressive power |
| 5 |
management for its hard drive. That is, already after only about five |
| 6 |
seconds(!!) of inactivity, the HDD spins down. This is kind of insane |
| 7 |
- you edit some small file, only half a minute later when you save it, |
| 8 |
you have to wait for what feels like ages for your HDD to spin back up |
| 9 |
and actually do something. ;-) |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
The first thing I tried was having a look at the BIOS to see if HDD |
| 12 |
power management can be disable there. But no sir, no such option. Ok, |
| 13 |
no problem I thought, and emerged "hdparm", which I have added to my |
| 14 |
default runlevel, so that it gets executed with the arguments "-B 254 |
| 15 |
-S 0" upon each boot. That seems to fix it, HDD power management is |
| 16 |
off and no more unwanted spindowns occur. |
| 17 |
|
| 18 |
However, now comes the problem: It seems that whenever I change from |
| 19 |
wall power to battery power (probably also vice versa, but I haven't |
| 20 |
tested this often enough), the machine's HDD forgets about the |
| 21 |
settings I've made using "hdparm" and starts spinning down right again |
| 22 |
after only a few seconds of inactivity. That sucks. |
| 23 |
|
| 24 |
Of course, manually executing "hdparm -B 254 -S 0 /dev/sda" after |
| 25 |
unplugging the machine fixes the issue again. However, something more |
| 26 |
"automated" would be prefered. |
| 27 |
|
| 28 |
First thing, I'm wondering if the change in power management |
| 29 |
parameters is actually caused by something at the OS level. I haven't |
| 30 |
set up any such thing explicitly, so I believe that it's something the |
| 31 |
machine just "does" outside of the OS's control. As it can be |
| 32 |
overridden by executing "hdparm" manually, what I would need is probably |
| 33 |
a place where I can hook in with a little shell script that gets |
| 34 |
executed every time the system's power source changes, and does |
| 35 |
nothing else than just execute "hdparm" with the appripriate |
| 36 |
parameters. So much about the theory, but then I don't really have an |
| 37 |
idea what I'd have to do to get a script to run every time the power |
| 38 |
source changes. And that's why I'm writing this message, as any |
| 39 |
suggestions that could point me into the right direction are very |
| 40 |
welcome. ;-) |
| 41 |
|
| 42 |
Greetings and thanks in advance, |
| 43 |
Nils |
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
-- |
| 46 |
Nils Holland * Ti Systems, Wunsorf-Luthe (Germany) |
| 47 |
Powered by GNU/Linux since 1998 |
Archives