Hi,

I'm wondering how many people on current-users use NetBSD on laptops,
and if so, how many of you have come across the problem I'm facing.

When I hit the power button with NetBSD/i386 + ACPI, or run poweroff
-q, the system syncs filesystems, and then switches off. But when it
does so, the hard disk is still spinning, and causes a sharp
retraction which doesn't sound pleasant and I suspect reduces disk
life. The way to sort this out is by spinning down the hard disk
before powering off the board.

I'm wondering if people who use Laptops + NetBSD see this, and if so,
could you please ack. on list.

I've seen this on my old laptop ( ibook G3 ) and my current one (
intel centrino + acpi ).

There is a fix here:
http://www.zyxware.com/cherry/downloads/netbsd-anvil/netbsd-shutdownhooks/

and you're welcome to try it out. If it works, again, please give a
shout on-list. I just want to make sure we have sufficient user
motivation to bring in these patches, as they touch a lot of code. If
its just me, i can always maintain a local hg patchset and not worry
about committing it.

Cheers,
-- 
~Cherry