To Bart Samwel: If the laptop is idling, with no apps doing anything that requires the disk, then I expect the disk to park, then spin down and stay spun down. You are correct that dirty pages will get flushed out within 30s, but the point is that if the user is not doing anything (or is doing something irrelevant to the hard disk like watching a DVD, or reading a cached [clean] document) then there should be no dirty pages to be flushed. These are both of the use cases in https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/power-management-in-ubuntu
This works in linux now as long as you don't have things being written - you can try it out by rebooting to single user mode so no processes other than sh are running. ACPID on certain laptops was an extreme example, as it was logging at a particularly high rate, but there are other daemons and applications that needlessly read from or write to the hard disk. Thunderbird, for example, should be using inotify, not polling the mail file (I assume that's what it's doing). We should find these daemons and applications (at least the ones in the standard ubuntu install) and fix them so they don't access the disk unnecessarily. Starter for ten: ACPID. -- Hard drive spindown should be configurable https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/17216 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
