Ubuntu for laptops

[Patrick Goetz]

Martin Owens wrote:
> 
> What would be more ideal is to sort out the file system driver so it
> behaved differently when it's on battery power (or in any kind of energy
> conservation mode).
> 

Based on having spent a few days reading through the massive ext4 debate 
that occurred between the 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernel releases, this seems 
hard to nearly impossible and would add additional complexity to 
everyone's installation through a much more complicated kernel driver. 
In particular, if this were easy to implement, Ted T'so would probably 
have already done it.  There are simply too many different ways to 
optimize; it seems unlikely that any one kernel configuration can be 
bent to meet all needs.  The next generation filesystems such as 
ZFS/btrfs seem even further removed from these kinds of features, but 
I'm just speculating about that.

A lot of interesting discussion can be found here:

http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/12/delayed-allocation-and-the-zero-length-file-problem/
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/
and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781?comments=all