Bill Sommerfeld writes:
>For maximal battery life on portables, you really want to keep the
>disk spun down as much as possible.

Agreed.

But I think you are to convervative.

>	1) change `/sbin/update' to let the time-between-syncs be a
>	   configurable parameter.  On laptops, you have your own
>	   UPS, so letting users change the period to 5 or 10 minutes
>	   instead of 30 seconds would be reasonable.

Ideally you wouldn't want to update at all.  Since all the memory is
battery backed you could consider this "stable storage."

In anycase, you don't want to spin up the disk to flush dirty buffers
if you can avoid it.  You should flush dirty buffers when the disk is
already running.

>	2) change FFS to keep "fuzzy" access times.
>	   the proposal is, when updating the atime field, to not
>	   change it (and not dirty the inode/bufcache page) if the
>	   timestamp is within <fuzz> of the current time.

Better: mark the inode as "changed and needs updateting at a
convenient point".

Of course, this isn't i386-specific at all.  Should the thread be
moved to tech-kern or where?
-- 
Christoph Badura	bad@flatlin.ka.sub.org

You don't need to quote my .signature.  Everyone has seen it by now.
Besides, it doesn't add anything to the current thread.