/etc/sysconfig/harddisks deprecated?

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 15:45 -0500, Michel Alexandre Salim wrote:
> I normally tune my hard drives using /etc/sysconfig/harddisks, back when
> using FC2, and after a few months of not running Fedora it was quite
> surprising to me to find the settings not applied (my laptop boots Linux
> with DMA enabled but IO support set to 16-bits, so the slow-down is
> noticeable).
> 
> rpm -q --changelog initscripts | grep hdparm shows that Bill Nottingham
> removed this in December 2004, so the questions are:
> 
> 1. Shouldn't hdparm not include /e/s/harddisks anymore?
> 2. What is the current recommended method to tune hard drives?

The current plan that we (the Red Hat desktop team) for FC5 involves
putting gnome-power-manager in the distribution which includes
automating all of this. Simply put, we just want two settings and flip
between these for the laptop use case, e.g. when transitioning from
running on AC power to running on battery / UPS. This probably involves
things like setting harddisk spindown time and not much beyond that. We
probably also want to enable/disable laptop-mode stuff during the
transitions, but that is another thing. 

So, I guess I really see no need to provide configuration for these two
set of "sane" settings, we should rather spend energy on choosing sane
defaults that work for everyone. If someone comes up with a really good
reason for tweaking this later on we can always add it.

Btw, people with servers  should be able to use /etc/rc.local (which
runs after e.g. HAL have tuned the harddisks with our "sane" defaults)
to tune specific disks using hdparm or whaterver -  I don't think it
makes sense at all to have configuration files for this; in other
words /etc/sysconfig/harddisks sounds like a bad idea to me...

    David