Re: Weird hard disk noise on shutdown (bug #7674)

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On Wednesday 16 May 2007 9:49 am, Francesco Pretto wrote:
> 2007/5/16, Stephen Clark <Stephen.Clark@seclark.us>:
> > >On Tuesday 15 May 2007 5:08 pm, Dave Jones wrote:
> > >
> > >I'm confused.  Could someone please explain?
> > >
> > I agree. This didn't happen when I was just using the ide driver, why
> > can't libata work as well
> > as the old ide driver.
> >
> 
> Read my reply to that post. To summarize: libata, prior to 2.6.22rc1,
> lacked the feature to spindown the hard disk. The last discussion was
> about who's responsable to issue the STANDBYNOW command to the hard
> disk. Response from the discussion is: the kernel. Trying to issue it
> form userspace (iff your shutdown(8) implementation do so) will now
> result in a big fat warning, until these compatibility measures will
> be dropped from the kernel (soon or later).

The last bit was what threw me.  It seemed that the kernel was changed to do 
the right thing, but only as a compatability measure that would be dropped 
because userspace should be changed to start doing it (which seemed crazy).

It seems that the _warning_ is the compatability measure that will be dropped 
(or perhaps the ability for userspace to do the wrong thing at all?), and the 
kernel will continue to DTRT.

It's a bit confusing for those of us coming in late in the discussion. :)

Rob