Re: PATCH: ide: ide-disk freeze support for hdaps

[Yani Ioannou <yani.ioannou@gmail.com>]

Hi Pavel,

On 8/27/05, Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz> wrote: 
> Well, with my power-managment hat on:
> 
> we probably want "freeze" functionality to be generic; it makes sense
> for other devices, too.
> 
> "My battery is so low I can not use wifi any more" => userspace
> freezes wifi.
> 
> Now, having this kind of timeout in all the cases looks pretty ugly to my eyes.

Thing is the freeze attribute hasn't got much to do with power
management, this is just to freeze the queue, and park the drive head
ASAP (preferably with the unload immediate command supported by new
drives) in order to protect the drive in an impact. Unload immediate
doesn't even stop spinning the drive, so little power is saved.

Maybe a suspend attribute would be a good idea for something along the
lines of what you have in mind? A enable/disable attribute would
definitely make sense for that application.

I suppose renaming the attribute to "ramming_speed" or
"brace_for_impact", might make the purpose more clear ;).

Thanks,
Yani