Xuan Baldauf writes:
> this problem is possibly unrelated to reiserfs but related to
> linux-kernel, but now I can prove it: regular sync()s do prevent the
> spindown of (IDE) disks. There will be a call to sync() after 32 or less
> seconds have elapsed since the last sync(). Not a problem itself, but
> every sync spins up the disk again.
You may want to have a look at the atime/diratime mount options, or
even chattr -A to prevent certain files causing a write when they're
run/read.
Note that just executing "sync" causes its atime to be marked for update,
which will cause a write back to disk a short while later.
What I tend to do is to partition my system in such a way that / and /usr
can be mounted noatime (ie, all programs), /home is without any extra
options, and /var with nodiratime. Eg:
/dev/hda3 on / type ext2 (rw,noatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/hda4 on /usr type ext2 (rw,noatime)
/dev/hda5 on /var type ext2 (rw,nodiratime)
/dev/hda8 on /home type ext2 (rw)
Oh, I also set sshd to recreate its keys every 6 hours, and modify cron
so it doesn't log to file (there doesn't seem to be a command line option
for this).
With all this, I can get my machines (setup the way I have them) to run
for up to 6 hours without spinning up the drives (ie, over night). Oh,
the other thing is that I have set the standby timer on the hard drive
(hdparm -S) to be 10 minutes, which means its not spinning down during
my normal use.
Note that if you run stuff like xntpd, or squid, then it gets harder,
but its still possible to achieve.
_____
|_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
| | Russell King rmk@arm.linux.org.uk --- ---
| | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/~rmk/aboutme.html / / |
| +-+-+ --- -+-
/ | THE developer of ARM Linux |+| /|\
/ | | | --- |
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:31 EST