Hi, Nearly everyone has probably heard of the "Ubuntu destroyed my hard drive" controversy, which made headlines all over the Internet with stories such as these:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ubuntu+load_cycle_count&btnG=Search In the end, it was proclaimed that the problem is not Ubuntu's fault, since the only software mechanism that sets overly aggressive APM settings for hard drives is laptop-mode, which is disabled by default. See #59695. Okay, I'm open to this argument. But I don't think that it means that simply enabling laptop-mode should indicate that the user has given permission to the OS to trash his hard drive. Users that do enable laptop mode reasonably expect that the relevant settings they choose and specify in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf will be respected. Yet, unless I'm missing something, /etc/acpi/power.sh just plain clobbers them. Not only does it clobber them, though, it overrides on-battery HDD APM settings (hdparm -B, hdparm -S) with some pretty aggressive settings that can, in fact, lead to people's hard drives dying early. Users that think they are setting their HDD APM settings on the safe side (in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf) have no idea that their drives are being worked pretty hard. See #37187. A less important but equally relevant issue is the fact that laptop-mode.conf pretends that you can control when laptop-mode is entered/exited, but, in fact, power.sh explicitly overrides these settings, too. See #74394. So here are my questions: Why does /etc/acpi/power.sh run hdparm? It only does so when laptop mode is enabled, and laptop mode does this itself. Not only that, when going on battery, laptop-mode's native handling is overridden, but when going on AC, power.sh wins. Moreover, why do we have so many different ways to control handling of power-related events? As a user, it is pretty difficult to get in there and figure out why your settings are being blown away. Here is a list of power script directories on my system: /etc/acpi /etc/pm /usr/lib/pm-utils /etc/power /etc/laptop-mode /etc/apm Maybe things really need to be this complicated. If that's the case, is there any way we can make it more obvious to users what they should be doing? In my opinion, power handling is one of the biggest problems on Ubuntu. While a good portion of that is related to difficult hardware, the fact that the power-handling software pieces are so disjointed is also a major contributor. What can we do to sort this out? Thanks, Forest -- Forest Bond http://www.alittletooquiet.net http://www.pytagsfs.org
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
-- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss