Laptop is napping

[Geoffrey Leach]

On 04/09/07 15:33:16, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> > On 03/28/07 11:17:33, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> >> Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> >> > My new ASUS laptop periodically takes a 30 second or so nap.
> [snip]
> 
> I have a new laptop, from R-cubed Technologies.  They are using an
> ASUS
> motherboard in it.  I too am seeing these 30-second hangs, but only
> when
> I'm actively running Windows-XP Pro in a VM-Ware session (at least
> that's when I notice it).  They are causing SSH and my Windows VPN to
> drop the connections due to timeouts.
> 
> I've watched the speed of my disk drive drop from UDMA/133 all the way
> down to PIO0 (and it continues to try and drop from there, tho there
> is
> no place to go from there....)
> 
> >> What does "hdparm -I /dev/sda" show? It sounds like the drive may
> >> have power management enabled, and is spinning down.
> 
> I have just recently set:
> 
> hdparm -S 0 /dev/sda
> 
> Hopefully, this will keep the drive from spinning down.  Do I need to
> put this in rc.local?  RH recently removed the hdparm stuff from
> /etc/sysconfig....
> 
  > > hdparm (thanks for the pointer) shows that idle shutdown was
> configured
> > for the drive. A little digging turned a two-hour idle timeout.
> > Curiously, the problem started after about two hours, but definetly
> not
> > idle for that time.  I disabled idle timeout, and after two hours I
> get
> > the following. Repeats every 15 minutes or so.
> 
> This definitely does NOT sound promising.
> 
> > ata2.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
> > ata2.01: (BMDMA stat 0x64)
> > ata2.01: tag 0 cmd 0xa0 Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout)
> > ata2: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xd0)
> > ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs, Status 0xd0)
> > ata2: soft resetting port
> > ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100
> > ata2.01: configured for UDMA/25
> > ata2: EH complete
> > SCSI device sda: 195371568 512-byte hdwr sectors (100030 MB)
> > sda: Write Protect is off/etc/sysconfig/laptop-mode
> > SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
> > SCSI device sda: 195371568 512-byte hdwr sectors (100030 MB)
> > sda: Write Protect is off
> > SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back

Turns out that the source of my problem was a HAL-initiated probe of  
the optical drive (ata2 in the above) and NOT the hard disk. You might  
wish to try either a blank disk in the optical drive or stopping HAL  
(System->Administration->System Services->Services), although the  
latter action has the side-effect of disabling shutdown and  
auto-mounting the optical drive.

Should you need to tweak the hdparm settings, you can find them in   
/opt/rcubed/share/fc6/etc/sysconfig/laptop-mode and  
/etc/sysconfig/laptop-mode

Good luck.