OpenSUSE Hardware :: Disable Drive Write Cache At Boot With Hdparm?
Jul 16, 2010
I'm testing OpenSUSE 11.3 on a server and I'd like to disable the write cache on all of my drives. In Ubuntu Server I was able to accomplish this with hdparm by adding the appropriate settings to /etc/hdparm.conf
As far as I can find the only thing that OpenSUSE offers is /etc/sysconfig/ide which allows you to force particular DMA modes. I could just put the hdparm commands in /etc/init.d/boot.local but I'd prefer to do it the right way if there is a right way to do this in OpenSUSE.
I have problem with umounting usb flash drives. When I insert usb flash and copy big files to it ( 400MB ) copy process is quick ( system use cache to store files ). After this when I umount this drive, after 1 minute I got error that this drive cannot be unmounted ( because cache is not stored in drive, umount time limit I think ). How to disable write cache to usb flash drives, change its size or change umount timeout.
How do i disable the linux file cache on a xfs partition (both read an write).
We have a xfs partition over a hardware RAID that stores our RAW HD Video. Most of the shoots are 50-300gb each so the linux cache has a hit-rate of 0.001%.
I have tryed the sync option but it still fills up the cache when copinging the files. ( about 30x over per shoot :P )
How I can disable the driver cache or adjust it better? I have / ext 2 everything else ext4 and my storage drive has xfs. Anytime I need to do a reset, whatever is in the cache is unreadable afterward. I like to avoid this. The best would be not to have a reset, but sometimes it just happens. Can I do that?
I am running Xebian on my old Xbox. Currently I am trying to fit an old hdd that is locked (to a mo-bo that has expired). I have connected it up instead of the dvd drive and booted with it as slave. The OS can access it using hdparm -I /dev/hdb, but it showing as locked I have the key which is:
I am trying to input this using hdparm I have tried:
hdparm --security-mode U --security-unlock 761dd32be9df1796643b5c5fd995ba4e74f5e50e000000000000000000000000 /dev/hdb
which doesn't work. What format does the password need to be in. I suspect ASCII but I can't type some of the characters. Is the rest of the syntax correct? EDIT I have another key:
XboxHDKey d0 f3 f9 9a 03 20 41 b7 a4 70 bd eb 1b b3 cc ac
On a Powerbook G4, I set hdparm to set the filesystem readahead (-a) to the maximum 2048 on boot. This produces a visible increase in performance... But today the hard drive started acting up - first generating I/O errors when trying to access various system binaries, and the second time bringing the desktop to a standstill and emitting loud clunking noises.In both cases the drive worked normally after a reboot... Even so, these are not what I'd consider good signs. However, the computer was working perfectly up until now, so I'm wondering if my tweaking was responsible. Can overly aggressive filesystem readahead settings damage an IDE hard drive?
I have Intel X25-V SSD connected to linux machine and its status is shown as "[sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled" in dmesg. I knew we can disable write cache using hdparm. Is there any way to disable read cache and is this read cache present on SSD ?
I want to disable processor cache or in other words, want to read write data directly from RAM... Is there any way to make it possible? I am talking about on chip cache memory not any disk cache stuff.
I have hdparm running and see the reading in gkrellm .dev/sda = 36 celcius in messages smartd[2895]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 108 to 107 Where to change that smartd reading?
I currently discovered a problem when using the floppy drive /dev/fd0: I can't use it. I can mount /dev/fd0 as normal, can create/write a file, but it is not written to the floppy disk. Instead of that the current program (eg vim) hangs (or is "uninterruptable") until I remove the floppy disk from the drive. Because of the removal I get several errors in /var/log/messages. What I'm doing:
== snip == mount /dev/fd0 /mnt echo "TEST" > /mnt/test sync [--> HANG until I remove the floppy disk] [sync "completes"/terminates, insert floppy disk] umount /mnt == snap ==
(In this example I used echo instead of vim, because it behaves the same in this situation) The errors I get are as follows:
I have a windows 7 hard drive as Sda0 and have a second hard drive as Sdb1, which is where I want to install OpenSuse 11.4. Now here is where I am not sure on the install, so I don't screw my self up. I have 100mb partition on sda0 that windows 7 is using, do I enable grub or have the boot write to MBR?
I have managet to customize my logon screen the way i want it,
1.
Problem is i do not wish to have background imege at bootsplash screen (still want to receive option how to boot just simple text);
2.
And later when system is loading modules and starting i just want to have simple black background on my screen, with nice text (verbose) telling me what is done.
I have ubuntu lucid lynx server running on an old eMachine as a fileserver. It has a big (2TB) slow (10-20 MB/s) external drive (ntfs-3g), and a small (20G) fast (60 MB/s) internal drive (ext3).
Using smbfs and vsftpd and sshd, all my data lives on the big drive and I'll see dramatic speed differences between the drives.
I'm wondering, is there a way to things up so that the external drive uses a cache on the internal drive to speed things up?
For example ... ftpd takes data from a client, and instead of slowly writing it directly to the external drive, it is written first (and quickly) to the internal drive, then, later, it is written to the external drive?
Is if an existing option for me to disable the copy-on-write features of the MMU? I'm doing this for a project. I do not see this on the config menus (or I did not find the correct place). If it's not an existing option, do anyone know how can I change the kernel so that it can do non-copy-on-write fork?
I'm trying to set up an SSD as a cache to my external HDD (which is where my installation of Debian testing/stretch is installed). My installation is using LVM 2. I'm trying to have the SSD cache the entire external HDD, and not just one of the partitions (such as the root or home partitions).
Here are the relevant outputs.
uname -a: (Yes, I'm using the Debian stable kernel with Debian testing.)
I've got a bare bones Ubuntu 10.04 set up (xorg, openbox, usbmount). My (vfat32) stick drive mounts, and I can see what is in the one directory on the drive, but I can't write to the drive unless I use sudo. I tried the obvious step of attempting to change permissions on the drive..
I had the idea to cache writes to my nfs filesystem on my local hard drive.
It seems CacheFS exists to cache reads, but not writes to nfs.
I would imagine that if I could cache writes to my nfs on a local drive I could have a fast system, but keep all my files where I want them on my network.
I'm thinking about this because I am planning on buying a SSD, and I would imagine if I could set things up this way the system could be lightening fast while keeping things on the network. Currently if I copy a large file (hundreds of MB) it is quite slow, with an SSD and caching, I would imagine the copy could be very fast.
Dual Booting my laptop and unable to change the Boot Records on the drive. Not because I dont know how, but my primary OS will fail to boot(win7).
I have drive partitioned as follows... sda1 = Win7 system (default install) sda2 = Win7 Main (default install) sda3 = swap sda4 = Extension (I think thats what its called) sda5 = / (ext4)
What I need is a boot cd or perferably Grub installed on a 256MB Thumb drive with the options to load the installed system from sda5.
how to make removable media (e.g. USB sticks) not have any write caching. I want to prevent data loss when they are removed after file copying appears done but before write caches are written. I'm using Gnome on Squeeze.
I've found suggestions of adding the 'sync' mount option to /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options in the Gnome configuration. However this doesn't seem to completely eliminate write buffering, as the drive activity light continues for several seconds after file copying appears done, and unmounting drives produces a dialog box which says to wait whilst data is written to disk.
I have a Dell laptop with Windows XP installed, and for various reasons (Help: I borked my WindowsXP boot when installing OpenSUSE 11.3) I can not install a GRUB boot loader to the first hard drive (hd0).
I currently have a second hard drive in this laptop with a perfectly working OpenSUSE 11.3 instance, but no way to boot into it. I remember back in ancient times, a common option with Linux distros was to create a boot floppy to boot into Linux rather than installing GRUB or LILO to MBR. Since this laptop doesn't have a floppy drive I'd like to do the same thing with a USB stick. Is there any way to install GRUB (or something similar) to a USB stick? What I am not asking here is whether I can put a full, bootable Linux instance on a USB drive - I only want a boot loader on USB that launches to the appropriate mount point on (hd1).
I don't understand this error nor do I know how to solve the issue that is causing the error. Anyone care to comment?
Quote:
Error: Caching enabled but no local cache of //var/cache/yum/updates-newkey/filelists.sqlite.bz2 from updates-newkey
I know JohnVV. "Install a supported version of Fedora, like Fedora 11". This is on a box that has all 11 releases of Fedora installed. It's a toy and I like to play around with it.
I was laughing about klackenfus's post with the ancient RH install, and then work has me dig up an old server that has been out of use for some time. It has some proprietary binaries installed that intentionally tries to hide files to prevent copying (and we are no longer paying for support or have install binaries), so a clean install is not preferable.
Basically it has been out of commission for so long, that the apt-get upgrade DL is larger than the /var partition (apt caches to /var/cache/apt/archives).
I can upgrade the bigger packages manually until I get under the threshold, but then I learn nothing new. So I'm curious if I can redirect the cache of apt to a specified folder either on the command line or via a config setting?
I installed squid cache on my ubuntu server 10.10 and it is work fine but i want to know how to make it cache all files like .exe .mp3 .avi ....etc. and the other thing i want to know is how to make my client take the files from the cache in the full speed. since am using mikrotik system to use pppoe for clients and i match it with my ubuntu squid
I am using Ubuntu Maverick on my Eeepc 701, and everything is working quite nicely. Since I only have 4GB SSD drive, my setup is that the LiveCD is booted from the SSD, while my 'casper-rw' partition is on a 4GB SD card. I have 2GB of ram and do not use swap. I am wondering if there is a way to somehow cache the results of the hardware probe and configuration, and insert the cache into LiveCD by remastering it. The idea is that less time will be needed to boot, since everything that was found from the first boot was saved.
Of course this would mean that particular modified LiveCD wouldn't reliably boot on anything other than my system (or one like it), but seeing as how my hardware won't change in the future, it isn't a problem.
Is something like this possible? I'm not afraid of recompiling a kernel or rebuilding an initramfs if needed. A possible alternative idea to accomplish this would be to boot up the vanilla LiveCD as normal, configure a swapfile, hibernate, then inject this swapfile into the LiveCD image.
This way, every boot would automatically just be resuming from hibernation. This could potientally mess with the casper-rw partition, but that is something I would worry about later (and I am not opposed to just eliminating the casper-rw partition altogether and running off ram each boot).
The other problem might be that the swapfile would probably need to be the size of my ram (2GB). Chances are, after a fresh boot my ram will be mostly empty, therefore would it be possible to compress the swapfile (like swapfile.gz)? I will be looking into either alternative, but I was hoping to get some opinions / ideas on how to accomplish this (or whether it has already been done!)
I've been using ubuntu for the past year now but unfortunately I have to confess I never had to compile anything from scratch. I bought a new intel SSD drive and I've been running some benchmarks on it with various fs. The new hdparm version has a few features that I'd like to test (TRIM/wiper) but I don't know how to install it as it's not in the repositories. I've been googling for almost 4hrs now but I still haven't found a way to do it.
I've downloaded the tar.gz file from sourceforge and I've decompressed it. Inside, it was a debian folder but there was no .deb file in it. Anyway I did a "make hdparm" and it compiled with no errors. It gave me an "hdparm" executable which works fine if I call it with the full path. what's the proper way to install it in place of the already apt-get installed package?
