Ken, Is it possible to put the drives to sleep, but not uninterruptable sleep? If so, I would think that would be a desirable alternative. I've got a drive that I wouldn't mind doing just that too, but until I read your post I hadn't had any idea just how to do that. -- Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ** =/\= No Penguins were harmed | ICQ#27816299 ** <_||_> in the making of this | ** =\/= message... | Registered Linux user #182496 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On Mon, 25 Sep 2000 3:00am ,Ken Wahl spake passionately in a message: > Hi all, > > I made the "discovery" earlier today that I could put idle hard drives to > sleep with hdparm. I have 3 IDE drives: 1 that is for rarely used > wintendo, 1 that is currently blank but DOS formatted waiting for me to > install FreeBSD, and the third for Linux. I issued hdparm -s commands for > the first two drives and added hdparm -S 241 for all three drives in > rc.local (but didn't reboot). > > I came back to the computer 5 hours later and ran top and found ~78 crond > in uninterruptible sleep, and load averages in the 80's even though CPU > utilization was only about 4%. Not knowing any better, I tried to kill > them and of course they wouldn't budge. The offending cron job was the > kmod script in /etc/cron.d/kmod which issues a rmmod -as to unload > unneccessary modules every 10 minutes. > > After doing some reading I realized I wasn't going to be able to kill or > reset the cronds in unint. sleep and would have to reboot since it had > been hours and no timeout had expired to reawaken the cronds. I sweared a > blue streak and commented out the rmmod command in /etc/cron.d/kmod, > removed the hdparm -S for my linux drive in rc.sysinit and rebooted. > > Since the first two drives were in standby mode, during shutdown umount > didn't want to wait for those drives to spin up to unmount the DOS > partitions and gave up before unmounting my linux drive partitions > (/dev/hdc1-3) forcing an fsck on boot-up. > > Once booted up again, I removed the two non-linux drives from fstab and > unmounted them manually to avoid the umount wait problem on shutdown. I > don't really have any need to access those drives while running linux > anyway. So I rebooted again and everything is back to normal. > > My questions are: > > How could I have prevented this other than not putting those drives to > sleep? It seems like a waste to have them spinning constantly for no > reason. > > Would it be safe to reactivate the kmod cron job? Is rmmod looking for > loadable modules on other partitions beside my linux partitions? > > What would be the repurcussions of not reactivating the kmod cron job? I'm > only loading 3 small modules and have memory to spare. > > Will having those 2 non-linux drives unmounted and in standby cause more > jobs to be put in uninterruptible sleep, like when slocate updates is > database every night? > > Any other info/suggestions? > > Thanks for your patience.. >
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