From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: When I boot into a 2.6.10 Fedora kernel the Load_Cycle_Count for my harddisk (as reported by smartctl) increments about 2 or 3 times a minute. At this rate the harddisk will reach its 'end of life' engineering limit on the number of head parks in less than a year. According to my /var/log/messages.* this started about two weeks ago, around the time I upgraded to the 2.6.10 kernel (in those two weeks the Load_Cycle_Count increased as much as in the previous 9 months). It does NOT happen when I boot into a 2.6.9 kernel, so it seems to be a kernel issue, or maybe it is an interaction of this kernel with my particular hardware. If it is a general problem, there will be many people experiencing unexpectedly early hard drive failure. I only noticed it because I have smartd logging set up (which is not a fedora default). It is not noticable from any unusual drive activity. I have resolved the issue for myself by adding "hdparm -B254 /dev/hda" to my startup scripts. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernels 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 and 2.6.10-1.737_FC3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 or other recent 2.6.10 Fedora kernel 2.Use smartctl to log Load_Cycle_Count for the hard drive 3. Actual Results: Load_Cycle_Count increments on average 2 to 3 times per minute (but not at very regular intervals). No power-save features are explicitely turned on in my system (laptop-mode is not on). Does not happen with 2.6.9 kernel. Expected Results: Load_Cycle_Count should not increment in normal use without turning on power-save features, and should increment much more rarely even if power save feature are turned on (using a 2.6.9 kernel with laptop-mode and running on battery, Load_Cycle_count increments by less than 20 per hour in normal use, as opposed to about 150 per hour with the 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 kernel). Additional info: Hard drive is HITACHI IC25N040ATCS04-0, 40 Gb Hard Drive
Nothing to do with the IDE layer. We don't touch the power management registers except when the user asks via power management. Suspect it may be the ACPI code ?
does booting with acpi=off make this problem go away ?
No, booting with acpi=off makes no difference.
Dave suggested checking power management in the BIOS. It was on. Turning it off fixes the issue. Seems my machine has pretty aggressive power management from the BIOS and earlier kernels hid that by disabling it.
I don't think that turning the power management off is a proper solution as it will reduce the battery time. I think the real issue here is that the partition is not mounted correctly. With the default fstab configuration hard drive power management does not work because the drive get woken up all the time to write journal information and such. I am not sure how to confirm this. Does this sound plausible? Wouldn't the real solution be to change the file system parameters for the hard drive when power management is enabled so that this problem does not occur and we get the better battery life? I am not very experienced with Linux but I would be willing to help. Problems with running on battery -- short battery life and poor performance, is keeping me from using it more often.
I have no problem with turning off power management in BIOS. Laptop-mode still gives me very good power-management, courtesy of linux rather than the BIOS. I get about 3 hours 40 minutes on battery. Anyway, this was not a linux bug -- it was that my BIOS/drive combination (in my OEM laptop) that gave overly aggressive power management. Other laptops probably don't have this problem, so can leave power management on in BIOS if they want. (If my laptop is typical, the BIOS setting was anyway overridden by kernels up to 2.6.9 but no longer in 2.6.10.)