From: Bart Samwel Adds /proc/sys/vm/laptop-mode: a special knob which says "this is a laptop". In this mode the kernel will attempt to avoid spinning disks up. Algorithm: the idea is to hold dirty data in memory for a long time, but to flush everything which has been accumulated if the disk happens to spin up for other reasons. - Whenever a disk request completes (read or write), schedule a timer a few seconds hence. If the timer was already pending, reset it to a few seconds hence. - When the timer expires, write back the whole world. We use sync_filesystems() for this because it will force ext3 journal commits as well. - In balance_dirty_pages(), kick off background writeback when we hit the high threshold (dirty_ratio), not when we hit the low threshold. This has the effect of causing "lumpy" writeback which is something I spent a year fixing, but in laptop mode, it is desirable. - In try_to_free_pages(), only kick pdflush if the VM is getting into distress: we want to keep scanning for clean pages, deferring writeback. - In page reclaim, avoid writing back the odd random dirty page off the LRU: only start I/O if the scanning is working harder. The effect is to perform a sync() a few seconds after all I/O has ceased. The value which was written into /proc/sys/vm/laptop-mode determines, in seconds, the delay between the final I/O and the flush. Additionally, the patch adds tools which help answer the question "why the heck does my disk spin up all the time?". The user may set /proc/sys/vm/block_dump to a non-zero value and the kernel will print out information which will identify the process which is performing disk reads or which is dirtying pagecache. The user should probably disable syslogd before setting block-dump. --- 25-akpm/Documentation/laptop-mode.txt | 505 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 25-akpm/drivers/block/ll_rw_blk.c | 14 25-akpm/fs/fs-writeback.c | 3 25-akpm/include/linux/sysctl.h | 2 25-akpm/include/linux/writeback.h | 5 25-akpm/kernel/sysctl.c | 20 + 25-akpm/mm/page-writeback.c | 62 +++- 25-akpm/mm/vmscan.c | 61 ++-- 8 files changed, 645 insertions(+), 27 deletions(-) diff -puN /dev/null Documentation/laptop-mode.txt --- /dev/null Thu Apr 11 07:25:15 2002 +++ 25-akpm/Documentation/laptop-mode.txt Mon Apr 5 14:50:08 2004 @@ -0,0 +1,505 @@ +How to conserve battery power using laptop-mode +----------------------------------------------- + +Document Author: Bart Samwel (bart@samwel.tk) +Date created: January 2, 2004 + +Introduction +------------ + +Laptopmode is used to minimize the time that the hard disk needs to be spun up, +to conserve battery power on laptops. It has been reported to cause significant +power savings. + +Contents +-------- + +* Introduction +* The short story +* Caveats +* The details +* Tips & Tricks +* Control script +* ACPI integration +* Monitoring tool + + +The short story +--------------- + +If you just want to use it, run the laptop_mode control script (which is included +at the end of this document) as follows: + +# laptop_mode start + +Then set your harddisk spindown time to a relatively low value with hdparm: + +hdparm -S 4 /dev/hda + +The value -S 4 means 20 seconds idle time before spindown. Your harddisk will +now only spin up when a disk cache miss occurs, or at least once every 10 +minutes to write back any pending changes. + +To stop laptop_mode, remount your filesystems with regular commit intervals +(e.g., 5 seconds), and run "laptop_mode stop". + + +Caveats +------- + +* The downside of laptop mode is that you have a chance of losing up + to 10 minutes of work. If you cannot afford this, don't use it! + +* Most desktop hard drives have a very limited lifetime measured in spindown + cycles, typically about 50.000 times (it's usually listed on the spec sheet). + Check your drive's rating, and don't wear down your drive's lifetime if you + don't need to. + +* If you mount some of your ext3/reiserfs filesystems with the -n option, then + the control script will not be able to remount them correctly. You must set + DO_REMOUNTS=0 in the control script, otherwise it will remount them with the + wrong options -- or it will fail because it cannot write to /etc/mtab. + +* If you have your filesystems listed as type "auto" in fstab, like I did, then + the control script will not recognize them as filesystems that need remounting. + +The details +----------- + +Laptop-mode is controlled by the flag /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. When this +flag is set, any physical disk read operation (that might have caused the +hard disk to spin up) causes Linux to flush all dirty blocks. The result +of this is that after a disk has spun down, it will not be spun up anymore +to write dirty blocks, because those blocks had already been written +immediately after the most recent read operation + +To increase the effectiveness of the laptop_mode strategy, the laptop_mode +control script increases dirty_expire_centisecs and dirty_writeback_centisecs in +/proc/sys/vm to about 10 minutes (by default), which means that pages that are +dirtied are not forced to be written to disk as often. The control script also +changes the dirty background ratio, so that background writeback of dirty pages +is not done anymore. Combined with a higher commit value (also 10 minutes) for +ext3 or ReiserFS filesystems (also done automatically by the control script), +this results in concentration of disk activity in a small time interval which +occurs only once every 10 minutes, or whenever the disk is forced to spin up by +a cache miss. The disk can then be spun down in the periods of inactivity. + +If you want to find out which process caused the disk to spin up, you can +gather information by setting the flag /proc/sys/vm/block_dump. When this flag +is set, Linux reports all disk read and write operations that take place, and +all block dirtyings done to files. This makes it possible to debug why a disk +needs to spin up, and to increase battery life even more. + +If 10 minutes is too much or too little downtime for you, you can configure +this downtime as follows. In the control script, set the MAX_AGE value to the +maximum number of seconds of disk downtime that you would like. You should +then set your filesystem's commit interval to the same value. The dirty ratio +is also configurable from the control script. + +If you don't like the idea of the control script remounting your filesystems +for you, you can change DO_REMOUNTS to 0 in the script. + +Thanks to Kiko Piris, the control script can be used to enable laptop mode on +both the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 series. + + +Tips & Tricks +------------- + +* Bartek Kania reports getting up to 50 minutes of extra battery life (on top + of his regular 3 to 3.5 hours) using very aggressive power management (hdparm + -B1) and a spindown time of 5 seconds (hdparm -S1). + +* You can spin down the disk while playing MP3, by setting the disk readahead + to 8MB (hdparm -a 16384). Effectively, the disk will read a complete MP3 at + once, and will then spin down while the MP3 is playing. (Thanks to Bartek + Kania.) + +* Drew Scott Daniels observed: "I don't know why, but when I decrease the number + of colours that my display uses it consumes less battery power. I've seen + this on powerbooks too. I hope that this is a piece of information that + might be useful to the Laptop Mode patch or it's users." + +* One thing which will cause disks to spin up is not-present application + and dynamic library text pages. The kernel will load program text off disk + on-demand, so each time you invoke an application feature for the first + time, the kernel needs to spin the disk up to go and fetch that part of the + application. + + So it is useful to increase the disk readahead parameter greatly, so that + the kernel will pull all of the executable's pages into memory on the first + pagefault. + + The supplied script does this. + + +Control script +-------------- + +Please note that this control script works for the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 series. + +--------------------CONTROL SCRIPT BEGIN------------------------------------------ +#!/bin/sh + +# start or stop laptop_mode, best run by a power management daemon when +# ac gets connected/disconnected from a laptop +# +# install as /sbin/laptop_mode +# +# Contributors to this script: Kiko Piris +# Bart Samwel +# Dax Kelson +# Original Linux 2.4 version by: Jens Axboe + +parse_mount_opts () { + echo "$*" | \ + sed 's/commit=[0-9]*//g' | \ + sed 's/,,*/,/g' | \ + sed 's/^,//' | \ + sed 's/,$//' | \ + cat - +} + +KLEVEL="$(uname -r | cut -c1-3)" +case "$KLEVEL" in + "2.4") + true + ;; + "2.6") + true + ;; + *) + echo "Unhandled kernel level: $KLEVEL ('uname -r' = '$(uname -r)')" + exit 1 + ;; +esac + +# Shall we remount journaled fs. with appropiate commit interval? (1=yes) +DO_REMOUNTS=1 + +# age time, in seconds. should be put into a sysconfig file +MAX_AGE=600 + +# Dirty synchronous ratio. At this percentage of dirty pages the process which +# calls write() does its own writeback +DIRTY_RATIO=40 + +# +# Allowed dirty background ratio, in percent. Once DIRTY_RATIO has been +# exceeded, the kernel will wake pdflush which will then reduce the amount +# of dirty memory to dirty_background_ratio. Set this nice and low, so once +# some writeout has commenced, we do a lot of it. +# +DIRTY_BACKGROUND_RATIO=5 + +READAHEAD=4096 # kilobytes + +# kernel default dirty buffer age +DEF_AGE=30 +DEF_UPDATE=5 +DEF_DIRTY_BACKGROUND_RATIO=10 +DEF_DIRTY_RATIO=40 + + +if [ ! -e /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode ]; then + echo "Kernel is not patched with laptop_mode patch." + exit 1 +fi + +if [ ! -w /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode ]; then + echo "You do not have enough privileges to enable laptop_mode." + exit 1 +fi + +case "$1" in + start) + AGE=$((100*$MAX_AGE)) + echo -n "Starting laptop_mode" + case "$KLEVEL" in + "2.4") + echo "1" > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode + echo "30 500 0 0 $AGE $AGE 60 20 0" > /proc/sys/vm/bdflush + ;; + "2.6") + echo "5" > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode + echo "$AGE" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs + echo "$AGE" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs + echo "$DIRTY_RATIO" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio + echo "$DIRTY_BACKGROUND_RATIO" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio + ;; + esac + if [ $DO_REMOUNTS -eq 1 ]; then + cat /etc/mtab | while read DEV MP FST OPTS DUMP PASS ; do + PARSEDOPTS="$(parse_mount_opts "$OPTS")" + case "$FST" in + "ext3") mount $DEV -t $FST $MP -o remount,$PARSEDOPTS,commit=$MAX_AGE,noatime ;; + "reiserfs") mount $DEV -t $FST $MP -o remount,$PARSEDOPTS,commit=$MAX_AGE,noatime ;; + "xfs") mount $DEV -t $FST $MP -o remount,$PARSEDOPTS,commit=$MAX_AGE,noatime ;; + esac + blockdev --setra $((READAHEAD * 2)) $DEV + done + fi + echo "." + ;; + stop) + U_AGE=$((100*$DEF_UPDATE)) + B_AGE=$((100*$DEF_AGE)) + echo -n "Stopping laptop_mode" + case "$KLEVEL" in + "2.4") + echo "0" > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode + echo "30 500 0 0 $U_AGE $B_AGE 60 20 0" > /proc/sys/vm/bdflush + ;; + "2.6") + echo "0" > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode + echo "$U_AGE" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs + echo "$B_AGE" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs + echo "$DEF_DIRTY_RATIO" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio + echo "$DEF_DIRTY_BACKGROUND_RATIO" > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio + ;; + esac + if [ $DO_REMOUNTS -eq 1 ]; then + cat /etc/mtab | while read DEV MP FST OPTS DUMP PASS ; do + PARSEDOPTS="$(parse_mount_opts "$OPTS")" + case "$FST" in + "ext3") mount $DEV -t $FST $MP -o remount,$PARSEDOPTS ;; + "reiserfs") mount $DEV -t $FST $MP -o remount,$PARSEDOPTS ;; + "xfs") mount $DEV -t $FST $MP -o remount,$PARSEDOPTS ;; + esac + blockdev --setra 256 $DEV + done + fi + echo "." + ;; + *) + echo "$0 {start|stop}" + ;; + +esac + +exit 0 + +--------------------CONTROL SCRIPT END-------------------------------------------- + + +ACPI integration +---------------- + +Dax Kelson submitted this so that the ACPI acpid daemon will +kick off the laptop_mode script and run hdparm. + +---------------------------/etc/acpi/events/ac_adapter BEGIN------------------------------------------- +event=ac_adapter +action=/etc/acpi/actions/battery.sh +---------------------------/etc/acpi/events/ac_adapter END------------------------------------------- + +---------------------------/etc/acpi/actions/battery.sh BEGIN------------------------------------------- +#!/bin/sh + +# cpu throttling +# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling for more info +ACAD_THR=0 +BATT_THR=2 + +# spindown time for HD (man hdparm for valid values) +# I prefer 2 hours for acad and 20 seconds for batt +ACAD_HD=244 +BATT_HD=4 + +# ac/battery event handler + +status=`awk '/^state: / { print $2 }' /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC/state` + +case $status in + "on-line") + echo "Setting HD spindown to 2 hours" + /sbin/laptop-mode stop + /sbin/hdparm -S $ACAD_HD /dev/hda > /dev/null 2>&1 + /sbin/hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda > /dev/null 2>&1 + #echo -n $ACAD_CPU:$ACAD_THR > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/limit + exit 0 + ;; + "off-line") + echo "Setting HD spindown to 20 seconds" + /sbin/laptop-mode start + /sbin/hdparm -S $BATT_HD /dev/hda > /dev/null 2>&1 + /sbin/hdparm -B 1 /dev/hda > /dev/null 2>&1 + #echo -n $BATT_CPU:$BATT_THR > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/limit + exit 0 + ;; +esac +---------------------------/etc/acpi/actions/battery.sh END------------------------------------------- + +Monitoring tool +--------------- + +Bartek Kania submitted this, it can be used to measure how much time your disk +spends spun up/down. + +---------------------------dslm.c BEGIN------------------------------------------- +/* + * Simple Disk Sleep Monitor + * by Bartek Kania + * Licenced under the GPL + */ +#include +#include +#include +#include +#include +#include +#include +#include +#include +#include + +#ifdef DEBUG +#define D(x) x +#else +#define D(x) +#endif + +int endit = 0; + +/* Check if the disk is in powersave-mode + * Most of the code is stolen from hdparm. + * 1 = active, 0 = standby/sleep, -1 = unknown */ +int check_powermode(int fd) +{ + unsigned char args[4] = {WIN_CHECKPOWERMODE1,0,0,0}; + int state; + + if (ioctl(fd, HDIO_DRIVE_CMD, &args) + && (args[0] = WIN_CHECKPOWERMODE2) /* try again with 0x98 */ + && ioctl(fd, HDIO_DRIVE_CMD, &args)) { + if (errno != EIO || args[0] != 0 || args[1] != 0) { + state = -1; /* "unknown"; */ + } else + state = 0; /* "sleeping"; */ + } else { + state = (args[2] == 255) ? 1 : 0; + } + D(printf(" drive state is: %s\n", state)); + + return state; +} + +char *state_name(int i) +{ + if (i == -1) return "unknown"; + if (i == 0) return "sleeping"; + if (i == 1) return "active"; + + return "internal error"; +} + +char *myctime(time_t time) +{ + char *ts = ctime(&time); + ts[strlen(ts) - 1] = 0; + + return ts; +} + +void measure(int fd) +{ + time_t start_time; + int last_state; + time_t last_time; + int curr_state; + time_t curr_time = 0; + time_t time_diff; + time_t active_time = 0; + time_t sleep_time = 0; + time_t unknown_time = 0; + time_t total_time = 0; + int changes = 0; + float tmp; + + printf("Starting measurements\n"); + + last_state = check_powermode(fd); + start_time = last_time = time(0); + printf(" System is in state %s\n\n", state_name(last_state)); + + while(!endit) { + sleep(1); + curr_state = check_powermode(fd); + + if (curr_state != last_state || endit) { + changes++; + curr_time = time(0); + time_diff = curr_time - last_time; + + if (last_state == 1) active_time += time_diff; + else if (last_state == 0) sleep_time += time_diff; + else unknown_time += time_diff; + + last_state = curr_state; + last_time = curr_time; + + printf("%s: State-change to %s\n", myctime(curr_time), + state_name(curr_state)); + } + } + changes--; /* Compensate for SIGINT */ + + total_time = time(0) - start_time; + printf("\nTotal running time: %lus\n", curr_time - start_time); + printf(" State changed %d times\n", changes); + + tmp = (float)sleep_time / (float)total_time * 100; + printf(" Time in sleep state: %lus (%.2f%%)\n", sleep_time, tmp); + tmp = (float)active_time / (float)total_time * 100; + printf(" Time in active state: %lus (%.2f%%)\n", active_time, tmp); + tmp = (float)unknown_time / (float)total_time * 100; + printf(" Time in unknown state: %lus (%.2f%%)\n", unknown_time, tmp); +} + +void ender(int s) +{ + endit = 1; +} + +void usage() +{ + puts("usage: dslm [-w