On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:12:07 +0100
Lars Engels <lars.engels@0x20.net> wrote:

quoted text
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 07:54:49PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> > On 2009-Mar-20 19:19:38 +0000, Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> wrote:
> > >There's a reluctance to include code like this, I
> > >think because it bypasses the ATA driver and talks directly to the
> > >drive. Since the driver doesn't know what the drive's been told to
> > >do, it can't know to adjust timers etc. to wait for the disk to
> > >spin back up, for example.
> > 
> > This code is no worse than installing sysutils/ataidle - which also
> > bypasses the driver.
> > 
> > As it stands, FreeBSD out-of-the-box behaves in a way that adversely
> > impacts laptop HDD life - and correcting this requires that the
> > end-user both be aware of the problem and then find, install and
> > configure a port to work around this.  I am very uncomfortable with
> > this and would prefer to see the base system require less user
> > knowledge/intervention.
> 
> AFAIK ataidle is under the BSD license, so we could include it in the
> base system.

As the author I can confirm that it is BSD licensed :)
Either way - including ataidle or patching atacontrol, I'd like to see
a utility to set APM and AAM features at a minimum in the base system
because especially with the problems on recent laptops it's something
we're missing.   

I mentioned the reluctance to include code like it
because when I initially wrote ataidle I got a bit of resistance about
including it, I think from the worry that it would cause problems.
There are indeed a few PRs reporting panics when spinning drives back
up, but I suspect the driver is more resiliant to those issues now.

-- 
Bruce Cran
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