From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261417AbVEPHIl (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 May 2005 03:08:41 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261419AbVEPHIk (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 May 2005 03:08:40 -0400 Received: from ppsw-9.csi.cam.ac.uk ([131.111.8.139]:56548 "EHLO ppsw-9.csi.cam.ac.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261417AbVEPHI2 (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 May 2005 03:08:28 -0400 X-Cam-SpamDetails: Not scanned X-Cam-AntiVirus: No virus found X-Cam-ScannerInfo: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/scanner/ To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: laptop-mode ruled by amount of cached data rather than elapsed time From: Elias Oltmanns Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 08:08:04 +0100 Message-ID: <87sm0n642z.fsf@denkblock.local> User-Agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi all, I\m using laptop mode even when the machine is connected to ac because it makes a huge difference in terms of noise in a really quiet room. The only thing that annoys me now is that the disk spins up after 10 minutes even if it has to write back rather small amounts of data. If I'm just reading, for instance, I don't add any valuable data. However, in the background syslog may have added another of these ---- mark $timestamp ---- lines in /var/log/messages or the exim4 queue runner added a line to /var/log/exim4/main.log and the like. I could, of course, extend the time between write backs but in that case it would take, say, half an hour until data is actually written to disk even if there was a huge amount of output. So, my question is whether there is a way to force data being written back once they have exceeded a certain limit or, even better, to write back data every 10 minutes if a reasonable amount has accumulated and skip one spin up otherwise. Thank you for your help, Elias