Ubuntu
acpi-support package

  1. Bug #59695
  2. Comment #41

Comment 41 for bug 59695

Revision history for this message
Daniel Hahler (blueyed) wrote : Re: default value in power.sh potentially kills laptop disks

Blue, thanks for your investigations. This looks like two bugs (too low default value and wrong handling of return code 255) in /etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm then, correct?

re init script: Ubuntu seems to use udev only, instead of the init script. But it appears to only hook into udev for hd[a-z] devices (I've just filed bug 156893 about this).

So, this part seems to be bugs in the "hdparm" package.

In acpi-support's /etc/acpi/power.sh:
"hdparm -B 1" sets "most aggressive power management".
power.sh additionally calls "hdparm -S $SPINDOWN_TIME" in the laptop_mode_enable function, where $SPINDOWN_TIME defaults to 12 (at least that's what I have here) - so I guess the latter "hdparm -S 12" is the real culprit here (it's even lower than APMD_SPINDOWN=18). This would led to spinning down the drive after 60 seconds.

I'm not sure, if actually spinning down (-S) or APM features (-B) are the problem here. Probably both?
Are the settings in /etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm considered/relevant at all?

Please add information about the distribution you are using and if you have /dev/hd[a-z] or /dev/sd[a-z] devices.

Probably in /etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm the SPINDOWN_TIME value from /etc/default/acpi-support should get used by default?!