> > It would be nice if the laptop feature to spin down the drive weren't
> > nearly completely defeated by Unix's intelligent memory management. I
> > know people have suggested (and implemented) disabling updating atime
> > as a solution, but i think that would only help a little. Really, all
> > disk activity should be avoided and delayed whenever the disk is spun
> > down.
> >
> > Ideally what i would like to see would be,
> >
> > 1 Just before the APM spins down the disk, a sync should be done.
> > Though i'm not actually sure there's any way to request such
> > notice.
>
> I think recent versions of apmd arrange for a callback from the BIOS
> before the machine suspends, and take advantage of this to sync. I'm
> still trying to get this set up properly.
>
> There is room for improvement wrt avoiding writes if the disk is spun
> down.
I have modified bdflush to do exactly following, it needs _NOT_ to
know about apm, it does need to patch kernel.
Mail me.
Pavel
-- I'm really pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz. Pavel Look at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/ ;-).