Re: No reset of IDE disk

[jbradford@dial.pipex.com]

> I posted the same message as you some weeks ago.

Sorry for the wasted bandwidth then - I am usually subscribed to the list, but temporarily de-subscribed for the last week.

> People said me that
> after a -Y you must always do a -w. Yes, the manpage can say that the
> kernel should do a -w of needed...but perhaps the man page is out of
> date...people here should know more...

Hmmm, the man page may well be out of date.

However, I would have thought that anything that stalls the IDE queue was to be considered a bug.  I've E-Mailed Mark Lord, (the hdparm maintainer), to get some more input on this.

The interesting thing is that it does automatically recover from a -Y on the laptop running 2.4.19, (as it did with 2.2.13).

> the -w is the hard soft reset i think ;)

Yeah, it's a device reset.

> I was told to use -y. And it works well. I dont know the differences
> between -y and -Y (apparently, it should do the same ;)

Well, as far as I know, -y is intended to be a fast recovery, whereas -Y is more or less a full shut down, somewhat analogous to the various levels of power saving implemented in DPMS-compliant "green" monitors.

Somewhat related to all this, I am interested in having a variable delay in the write-back caching, (yeah, I know, keeping data cached in RAM on a battery powered laptop is asking for it to get lost, but I'd like the option), that way I could spin the HD down and enjoy a much extended battery life.