On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 01:13:17PM -0500, Alejandro Bonilla wrote:OK, So if this is done by the user space then I think we can play more with it? I guess that we could do a type of hdparm -F or hdparm -S to spin down the drive or maybe there is a way to add feature to hdparm to park the drive itself.
I have a question here, how do you guys think that the head is parked, is it done by the controller directly, which then sends the command to the HD to park the head, or this is done by the operating system in some kind of way?
I think the OS or user space is too slow like to react to send a park command to the hard drive, so this most be done directly by the embedded controller, but still I think it needs some input from the OS, to initialize it's settings.
The only way to park a drive is to send a command to it through the IDE
interface. This can't be done by the controller itself, since the
controller in the ThinkPad is a classic Intel ICH chip which only passes
commands around.
The OS is definitely fast enough for this kind of task, it's doable even
in userspace, although not easy.
i.e. after all, in windows you do have the settings in the software
for HDAPS, but it looks like it is _not_ managed by the operating
system at all if there is some type of action to be taken. This is
also probably why HDAPS won't kick in until booted, and that is
because it needs to load its config setup by the software.
This is what I think, please correct me if I'm saying something crazy.
It is definitely all done by the windows kernel driver.