laptop-mode disabled in kernel?

[James Gray]

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marc wrote:
> In Dapper, my laptop fan never turns off after the first few minutes. It 
> is always on. Whereas, in Windows, it rarely comes on. I'm pretty sure 
> that this is because the disk never spins down.

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> Back to the disk. There's only one active ext3 partition plus swap - all 
> other partitions are noauto. I've tried noatime and commit=600, but to 
> noavail. Any ideas?

ext3 is the problem with your disk.  It uses a forced-flush interval of
about 30 sec IIRC.  In other words, regardless of what is or isn't going
on, the ext3 driver forces a sync and hence the hard drive never goes to
sleep (neither would you if someone poked you in the ribs every 30
seconds!).

Solution, unfortunately, requires reformatting ALL the ext3 partitions
with something else.  I'd suggest reiserfs as, like ext3, is a
journaling file system and is quite mature.  I can't remember if jfs and
xfs use the same "fixed sync interval" fru-fru like ext3 though, so I'll
hold short of recommending them.

HTH,

James
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