laptop-mode disabled in kernel?

[marc]

James Gray said...
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> marc wrote:
> > James Gray said...
> >> 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.
> >> - -->8-- Snipped --8<--
> >>
> >>> 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.
> > 
> > Thanks for this. I was in two minds about going this way, but then 
> > decided to jump.
> > 
> > And now, I have a little problem :-o
> > 
> > Here's the story, so far
> > 
> > - moved Kubuntu (on sda3) to a safe place while booted on another 
> > partition (sda6)
> > - formatted sda3 as reiserfs
> > - amended both fstabs (sda3 and sda6)
> > - mounted the newly formatted partition
> > - moved the data back onto sda3
> > - rebooted.
> > 
> > Grub currently loads from sda3, or rather it doesn't now. I'm getting an 
> > error 17 : Cannot mount selected partition. I'm not overly surprised, 
> > but I'm not sure what to do next.
> 
> You probably need to add the reiserfs module to the initrd.  Add the
> reiserfs line to /etc/modules then rebuild the initial ram disk
> (mkinitrd), then move the old one out of the way, and copy the new one
> in (with the same name as the old one).  Reboot and you should be sweet.

I tried this by adding the package initrd-tools and doing:

  mkinitrd -o initrd.img-2....

after adding resiserfs to /etc/modules. While keeping the partition as 
ext3 - to try the new initrd - I rebooted and got a kernel panic:

  mount: unknown filesystem type 'devfs'

It appears that I can't create the installed initrd from the 
installation. The resulting initrd is some 700kb smaller than that 
provided with the distribution.

-- 
Best,
Marc