[TriLUG] Laptop Linux

[Ed Hill]

On Sat, 2003-12-13 at 10:47, Kevin Sonney wrote:
> Jon Carnes <jonc at nc.rr.com> writes:
> > My guess is that the Win98 was hitting the disk quite often (for reasons
> > unknown) and that ate up the power.  The apps I was running on Linux
> 
> Windows has this bad habit of hitting the disk for swap even when it
> really doesn't need to. it also does regular pings into the
> configuration, and I think the CLOCK even updates something on disk. 
> 
> Windows in general is HD abuse, I think. 
> 
> > basically read the hard drive on start up and then ran fairly well right
> > out of RAM.
> 
> Linux does sane swapping - even in low memory situations, where Windows
> will swap to disk even if it's running just the desktop and has a Gig of
> ram free, it swaps.

Hi Kevin,

Yeah, Linux is very efficient/intelligent about using RAM as a buffer. 
But, to be fair, isn't there also an issue (or perhaps was there an
issue?) with the ext3 FS causing HD activity every 5 seconds?  For
instance, if you run:

  vmstat 1

wouldn't you see IO activity (even if its just a few blocks) on pretty
regular 5sec intervals if you had an ext3 FS mounted?

I remember someone showing me the above issue a year ago and pointing to
it as a reason why ext3 was not exactly an optimal choice for battery-
powered systems since it somehow prevented the HD from spinning down
during periods of inactivity.  Perhaps this issue has been fixed or
mitigated since I no longer see the same activity with recent Red Hat 9
kernels (am now running 2.4.20-24.9 on my laptop).

Can anyone cast more light on this topic?  Please?

thanks!
Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Room 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
            Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
email:   eh3 at mit.edu,  ed at eh3.com
URL:     http://web.mit.edu/eh3/
phone:   617-253-0098
fax:     617-253-4464
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