Software :: Disk Caching Utility For Power Saving ?
Nov 28, 2010
I run Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 on my EeePC 1005HA. I'm going to get a SSD for it eventually, but I can't afford one right now so it's running from a 200GB hard disk I scavenged off a dead laptop.
I went in power management and set the option that says "spin down hard drives whenever possible", but this accomplished a whole lot of nothing - whenever the computer is on, the drive's spinning. I ran hdparm -y and the drive clicked off, and then promptly spun back up after a few seconds. Iotop shows occasional tiny bursts of activity from "jdb2/sda1-8", which I don't really know how to interpret, but I don't have anything weird installed so I'm assuming this is normal system operation.
Now, what I need is some sort of application, utility, command - anything - that forces the computer to keep all filesystem changes in RAM with the drive shut down; every five/ten minutes or so (this would hopefully be configurable) it spins up the drive, dumps the filesystem changes to it, and spins it down again.
I realize this presents data loss risks related to crashing and poweroffs when the cache hasn't been dumped to disk, but I'm willing to risk it as Linux never really crashes at all, and since it's a netbook power failures won't cause unexpected shutdowns.
I have a 2 TB disk in an external SATA dock, formatted with a single ext3 (Linux) partition, which doesn't show up in the Windows 7 Computer Management->Disk Management utility, even as a raw/blank disk. I've verified that there's nothing wrong with the disk by connecting it to my Linux machine and mounting it, and I've verified that the dock is functioning properly by connecting a different FAT32-formatted disk, which mounts flawlessly as expected.I realize that I can't actually read the ext3 partition without additional software (e.g., Ext3IFS), but why doesn't the disk show up at all? Is there some sort of stupid anti-Linux filter built in? Is there any way to force Windows to recognize the disk, so that I can at the very least use direct block access with it?
Background: I want to clone an identical 2 TB disk onto this one. Due to my hardware layout, it's much easier to have the source disk attached to one machine and the destination disk connected to another, and do the clone over the network (the network is not a bottleneck with switched gigabit ethernet), than it is to hook them both up to one machine.(1) I did this once before when both machines were running Linux, but I've since upgraded the destination machine and decided to switch back to Windows for regular desktop use. I've got Cygwin installed, and have verified that the same basic method (dd + nc) will work, but I can't do anything if Windows doesn't even consider the destination disk to exist.I only have one eSATA port on each machine. Opening them up just to do this clone is a rather large annoyance. Also, since this is my backup disk, I'd like to eventually automate the cloning from the active disk to another one that I regularly swap with a third disk that I store off-site.
I recently installed the first non-virtual Ubuntu server in our office (to put it in perspective, it's outnumbered several to one by Windows servers). It had an inexplicable array failure, and now it's been retasked to run VMware Server for testing purposes since we don't trust it at the moment. For the sake of ease of use, on this server I decided to install Xubuntu desktop x64, rather than Ubuntu server as I've done with a couple others.
This server is on an old school 8-port Linksys PS/2 KVM. It's got a CRT monitor in the middle of a rack of somewhat aging equipment. The problem I'm having is somewhere between the KVM, this old monitor, and some power saving... when Xubuntu tries to put the monitor in standby, instead it gets this vertically scrolling garbage. The Windows servers in this rack don't have any problem putting it to sleep, but I figured I might as well just turn off DPMS on this particular server.
So I logged in via SSH, stopped GDM, generated a /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and changed Option "DPMS" to Option "NoDPMS" which according to the manpage should take care of it. I also changed the GDM video mode with this xorg.conf so it's definitely being used. Following some other suggestions I found in my search, I issued "xset s off" and "xset -dpms" but this hasn't disabled monitor power saving either. I've been restarting GDM each time I change something. 5-10 minutes later it's scrolling garbage again. What's it going to take to turn off monitor power saving at the GDM logon screen?
running PCLinuxOS 2009.1 on my main machine : AMD Phenom II 545, 3GB DDR2, ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 GDDR3, 1 x 250GB IDE, 1 x 1x 250 GB SATA, 1 x 160GB SATA, 1 x 500GB SATA.What I want to disable are the HDD's powering down after a while because when I come back to work at my machine, it is painful to wait for the HDD's to spin up again. I also want to disable the screen from turning off. I have removed DPMS from myxconfig, but it as made no difference.
I intend to buy a UPS for personal use. I have a slackware 13.1 machine on a quite old pc, and what I would like is just the PC to being turned off after 5minutes every time there is a blackout. I have found the APC Power-Saving Back-UPS Pro 550. However I don't know if there are drivers for slackware.
I don't understand disk sizes in Linux. I have a 500GB drive. It's ext4. I have run "tune2fs -m 0" on it to reserve the amount of space reserved for root to 0.
I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 that comes with a Disk Utility. When I run "System->Administration->Disk Utility (palimpsest)" the disk shows up as 500GB (see picture). But when I run df -h it shows up as 459GB. So, I don't understand the discrepancy.
When I run df I get the following:
Question: Why is Disk Utility showing me something different than "df"?
I am running openSUSE 11.2 x86_64. I am processing work units from Folding@home on this pc. Strange thing is, when I actually leave the pc alone and working on folding@home, my performance actually drops instead of going up as I would expect. I believe there is some kind of powersaving feature I cant find or something else that's hurting quite a bit on the PC. I am talking about maybe 20-30% performance loss. PC in question is: Athlon II 630.
Already deactivated Cool'n'Quiet from the BIOS. Got no fresh ideas on what could cause this weird behaviour.
Update: Code: [22:05:52] Completed 260000 out of 500000 steps (52%) [22:18:28] Completed 265000 out of 500000 steps (53%) [22:30:41] Completed 270000 out of 500000 steps (54%) [22:40:20] Completed 275000 out of 500000 steps (55%) [22:48:16] Completed 280000 out of 500000 steps (56%)
PC was "idle" working on folding and I came back at 54%, see the huge difference? Frames were taking about 13 minutes each when "idle". When I am using the computer, frames are done within 8 minutes.
I am planning to make a home made NAS running ubuntu server 10.04 LTS. Nothing fancy, simple samba with open access for all and openssh for admin access over the network. The NAS will not have heavy traffic, two home computers with occasional access, just to serve as central location. I am in doubt which CPU to use and I am after both budget and power saving solution.
1. I have an old Athlon Clawhammer I can use but the TDP of 90W is putting me off. I can also use existing 2x512MB DDR-400 memory with it. The board would be new. 2. I would rather invest in new mini-ITX board with built-in dual-core Atom D525 (TDP 13W), VGA and Gb ethernet. I would add 2GB DDR3-1333 memory.
Since I would need a new board for the Clawhammer too (current one doesn't have SATA), I am more attracted to option 2. Would the dual-core Atom be enough running this simple home NAS? I think it should but my experience with ubuntu server is limited.
I have a program that is very heavily hitting the file system, reading and writing randomly to a set of working files. The files total several gigabytes in size, but I can spare the RAM to keep them all mostly in memory. The machines this program runs on are typically Ubuntu Linux boxes.
Is there a way to configure the file system to have a very very large cache, and even to cache writes so they hit the disk later? I understand the issues with power loss or such, and am prepared to accept that. Crashing aside, in normal operation the writes should eventually reach the disk!Or is there a way to create a RAM disk that writes-through to real disk?
I've recently changed to Debian from Windows, it's a really great adventure so far, but I have one problem. So as I see you can set your monitor into "Blank Page" after 10 or any minutes to save power, like in Windows. 10 minutes passes, without any movement my monitor's led turns into orange and the monitor turns off, that's great, that's what i want.
But after a few seconds the led turns green (like when it's on), and it brings up a little box : "Power Saving Mode" (just like it did after 10 minutes), and it turns off, and then stars again from the beginning . And this goes on repeatedly until a move my mouse to get back from "Blank page" state. (It's like the monitor tries going into power saving mode, but it gets always a little bit of power, to show that text box, and start all over.) So what can I do? I use debian 8.0 "jessie", and my monitor is a LG L1750S(with Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT).
I am using Xubuntu 9.10 on a nettop as a X11 terminal.In order to do that, I created a custom session script that runs some commands instead of starting xfce4-session and the likes from GDM. When I boot this nettop, GDM automatically logs a dummy user in (called "test"), and runs a script that does "xhost +", and opens a small X Terminal to keep the X session alive, while some other computer sets the DISPLAY environment variable to point to <nettop>:0 and runs gnome-session.
My trouble is that after 10 minutes of idle, the screen is blanked(power saving I presume). I tried to add "xset -dpms" and "setterm -blank 0 -powersave off" to my startup script, in vain. I want my power saving options to be configured on the remote computer, not the nettop. How could I prevent X/GDM/Whoever from blanking the screen ?
I work on Ubuntu 9.04 and our application requirement is not to go to power saving mode when application is running. I added ServerFlags section to /etc/X11/xorg.conf Section "ServerFlags" Option "blank time" "0" Option "standby time" "0" Option "suspend time" "0" Option "off time" "0" EndSection
This didn't help. Then I tried following commands gconftool-2 -s /apps/gnome-power-manager/ac_sleep_display --type=int 0 gconftool-2 -s /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled --type=bool false I see that it works fine only if I change settings via Settings>ScreenSaver>Power Management in gnome. I wan to do this via script. Can I do this? Which file gets updated when I change display settings via Settings>ScreenSaver>Power Management.
All of a sudden today there was no display on my Ubuntu PC. It seems to be powering on - I get the LG screen when the monitor is switched on - but it goes into "Power Saving Mode". How do I diagnose this? I already unplugged and plugged. Monitor is connected to a graphics card - no change when I switched to VGA.
I've covered a little of the exploration of this in another thread here. Unfortunately no replies.I've now installed as many power-saving features as I can get to work including laptop-mode scripts and my Asus Eee PC 900 has the battery lifespan of a gnat (2 hours 39 mins of extremely light usage including a long period of inactivity although with wireless turned on, from fully charged to battery cutting out, annoyingly this time ignoring my script that registers a critical battery APCI event and shut it down safely).
So, basically is my new Asus Eee PC 900 the worst designed netbook ever, or is linux just not supporting it's power-saving features? It is actually the version that comes with Asus's own linux distribution on it, but I've installed Arch.
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What then are the power-saving options left available to me? How can I extend my battery life to long enough to check an email? What out of what I've said ins't working that really should?
when my monitor turns off after 30 minutes, I cannot do anything after. We're talking complete lock down of Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit. Not even alt+printscreen+REISUB reboots the machine; I have to do a hard reboot (which sucks and is hard on hardware).
So I've come across several tips to optimize battery life on Linux. [URLs]. In addition to undervolting, I would like to underclock. Is there a way to control CPU speed outside of the BIOS via some software control in Linux... or some sort of boot manager? I would like to boot to linux using underclocked speeds and have Windows running full blast. Is there a way to run Linux completely in RAM? I have read that saves on power consumption from the hard drive.
I am trying to figure out why, i need to restart/reboot ubuntu in order to reconnect wirelessly after being in power save mode. It works fine before the power-save mode and fine after the restart. Is it an IP issue?
I am on F15 32-bit with GNOME 3. I keep getting "A Hard Disk Is Failing" warnings from the Disk Utility, very frequently. Is this a serious issue? Because I knew this to be a bug in Palimpsest DU back in F13/14. Also how can I disable any notifications from this application?
I'm working on setting up a new NAS. I installed Karmic desktop on a 160 GB HD using the default settings.
Now I've added three 1TB drives and want to make them a RAID-5 array with LVM on that, and 1 ext4 partition. I want to use LVM so I can add drives and expand the array later.
So far I've been using Disk Utility (Palimpsest Disk Utility) and it's been great! A wonderful addition to Karmic! I got the RAID-5 array setup with no problems using disk utility. So now I have a 2000 GB raid-5 array setup in Disk Utility and I need to get LVM setup.
Problem is: I don't see any sign of LVM in Disk Utility. I've been googling all night and I can't find any documentation for setting up LVM in Disk Utility, just people saying that it's supported.
I tried installing the lvm2 package, rebooting, and then looking around again. No luck.
So, what am I missing? Should there be LVM options in Disk Utility? Where is it? Is there a better/easier way to configure lvm?
point me in the direction to get a step by step guide to setting up a Raid 5 using the Disk Utility and 3 spare drives? I have the main OS files on a 80gig drive and I would like to mount the 3 drives as Raid 5.Just shooting in the dark now.. Screen shot is attached. [URL]...
I'm searching for a GUI disk imager, something, that will be the GUI front end for dd. Ghost4Linux G4L is not an option, I want to be able to make security backups of my USB thumb drives, CDs, DVDs...
Has anybody ever used Disk Utility to set up software RAID? Here I am running terminal commands (I'm a terminal junkie) and I just happen to stumble across instructions that indicate "Or you can just set it up through Disk Utility."
Sure enough in disk utility, it looks like all of the configurable options are there. It makes me wonder, though... is this kind of GUI functionality something that isn't really solid? Or does it operate predictably and effectively?
i erase the partition of ubuntu by disk utility in mac oswhen i restart my laptop and select windows os partition but windows os not bootingand the screen show to meerror: no such partition.
When I use disk utility to expand my RAID array it creates a partition on my 1.5TB drive which it would like to add to the RAID 5.
However, none of the drive existing on the RAID are partitioned so what I think has happened is the partition itself has created a difference of about 2 million bytes smaller than the others and thus unable to add the component.
How can I specify the exact bytes for my hard drive partition so that I can add this to the array?
Right clicking on a drive will format the drive but Disk Utility 2.30.1 included with Ubuntu 10.10 will not format the drive and says the drive is busy.
I was on Ubuntu 10.04 I used the Disk Utility to edit the partitions.
Here is the table it's showing:
Here I deleted 79 GB patition from FAT32 to NTFS and deleted 50 GB space that was ext4 partition where SUSE was residing the bootloader was of SUSE that was working using the same utility.
After that with a live cd of ubuntu I tried to recover the grub but there was no device.map file. Later I found the partition table absent.
The utility shows above table but Gparted shows only 500GB free space without any partition. Please help can't loose all the data.
I can access the partitions in live environment I can't even install a fresh OS because It also shows 500GB unallocated space.
