On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 01:16:36PM +0100, Phil Knirsch wrote:
Sounds like a great idea and something i've been working on
myself
lately, too. I even went a bit further and thought about the idea if a
combination of a monitoring backend and a tuning engine could provide an
automatic adoption of the system to the current use. E.g. during daytime
when a user works with his machine we would typically see quite a few
reads and write all the time. Drive spindowns or other power saving
features could during that time be reduced so that the user will have
the best performance. During the night (in case he didn't turn of the
machine) only very few read and even fewer write operations should
happen, at which time the disk could then be powered down most of the
time. And of course this can be extended to not only disk drivces but
other tunable hardware components.
Indeed. There's been a fair amount of research into this - see
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~tbisson/papers/bisson-fast04.pdf for instance.
Some laptop drives will behave this way if APM settings are set
appropriately, but a decent implementation of this in userspace would be
very nice.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org