Re: [patch 2.6] don't put IDE disks in standby mode on halt onAlpha

[Miquel van Smoorenburg]

In article <1085675193.7179.5.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Arjan van de Ven  <arjanv@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 17:49, Ivan Kokshaysky wrote:
>> Spinning the disks down across a 'halt' on Alpha is even
>> worse than doing that on reboot on i386 (assuming the
>> boot device is IDE disk).
>
>how do you flush the disks' writecache then? Halting the disk seems to
>be the only reliable way to do so.

On Alpha, Sun and other hardware, "halt" puts you into the firmware
monitor. It doesn't actually turn the machine off, so it's not
critical to flush the write cache of the disk - the only time
that is really neccesary is right before poweroff, in all other
cases the disk will expire the write cache itself.

Mike.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/