Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu [LWN.net]

Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:58 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu by kevinbsmith
Parent article: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

You haven't understood the article at all.

You need not be using laptop mode to see high load / unload count. Without laptop mode your
disk uses the manufacturer's power on setttings, and if those include aggressive APM then you
may see an increasing count in this SMART old age parameter as a result.

Ubuntu (and everyone else) are just pointing out that unless you enable laptop mode their
software isn't touching these settings at all, and therefore any responsibility for the
settings must lie with the disk manufacturer.

As to whether you're "better off" with or without laptop mode, that depends what you want to
achieve. If one or the other option was just "better" then obviously it would always be set
that way.

If your hard disk dies within the warranty period, demand a replacement. If it doesn't, what
are you worrying about? And meanwhile remember to take regular backups. All good advice
without the hysteria about a SMART parameter that's not intended for end users to look at.

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Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 8, 2007 19:29 UTC (Thu) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

Unforunately, this is the kind of user-hostile response that is common in the other blog posts
and threads. Paraphrasing: "Your hard drive might die. Tough. Not our fault." 

I'm about a year or two out of warranty. If my drive dies for preventable reasons, I will
still be disappointed and annoyed. Should I not be "worried" about the expense, downtime, and
possible loss of even a few hours of work?

The point isn't to find blame. The point is to 

a) figure out what *I* can do to save my drive (or at this point maybe what I can do to save
the replacement drive I'll have to buy), and then 

b) figure out what distros could do to let other folks know that they need to do something to
save their drives, and then 

c) figure out if there is something distros can do to avoid the problem (even though the root
cause may be the drive and/or BIOS settings).

I have read that MS Windows overrides the disk and/or BIOS settings to avoid, or at least
minimize this problem. From a technical purist standpoint, It may be annoying to have to do
this, but sometimes such impurities are the least-bad option.

Real people are going to have to spend real money replacing real hardware. Let's try to
minimize that cost (and landfill usage), shall we?

Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 9, 2007 16:08 UTC (Fri) by lorien420 (guest, #44036) [Link]

I've never read these comments as user-hostile. The distro saying we won't touch these
settings isn't telling you they don't care, it's saying that it doesn't seem like something we
should do. Maybe if they find the magic number that everybody loves this won't be a problem.
Right now they have the people with dying laptop hard drives screaming at them. If they tweak
the number, maybe it will silence those people but anger some other user? Maybe the number
they pick will be wrong and instantly kill the hard drive? The right answer isn't clear, which
is why they're falling back on, "We won't touch it unless you explicitly tell it to."

Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 9, 2007 18:19 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

Let's look at the two issues seperately.

As far as I can tell, none of the distros have offered any official advice about how to deal
with this problem. That is a "we don't care" attitude. If the distros won't help, who will?
The minimum I would find acceptable is to advise users that there may be a problem, and
suggest possible things the user can do to mitigate. 

If you can point me to anything like that, please do. I have not yet found any official (or
unofficial) step-by-step instructions for things to try. Vague advice like "use hdparm" or
"turn on laptop mode" don't count.

It would be even better if they could find a way to "fix" it in software.

The comment posted above was, in my opinion, hostile to users. Notably: "If your hard disk
dies within the warranty period, demand a replacement. If it doesn't, what are you worrying
about?" Other forum posts elsewhere have been even worse.

There *is* a problem. We as a community *need* to find a solution. As I said, that might just
be providing step-by-step instructions so each user can manually tweak their machine to their
own preferences. And letting folks know they need to do that to avoid losing their drives. We
don't even have that yet.

Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 9, 2007 19:17 UTC (Fri) by lorien420 (guest, #44036) [Link]

While we may disagree on the "user-hostility" idea, I think you're definitely right that
people need to be informed about potential problems like this no matter whose fault it really
is.

Actually, I would say that's a general problem. As a community we have lots of resources to
find out about the problems and do our own sifting for solutions, but it seems like this
process is sometimes unnecessary. In this case for this bug, there's actually a metric for
when the distro can guess that something is going wrong (e.g., check every hour to see if the
spin count is increasing at an inappropriately high rate).

Unfortunately, there aren't that many tools to get this sort of information, at least not for
a desktop distribution. I think it would be interesting to see an interface along the lines of
Fedora's SELinux Troubleshooter for things like this. Maybe every hour a cron job starts up to
check for common errors with metrics like this. If there is one, an icon displays in the task
bar to tell you about it and point you towards some proposed fixes with all the requisite
warnings about changing your hardware defaults?