Paul van Tilburg schrieb:
I was wondering... Why did you focus on XFS? What are in your eyes the advantages? I'm using EXT3 on my current i386 laptop (and indeed suspending the disk is impossible, but I favor that over spinning up/down all the time which isn't good for the disk at all), will XFS be better?
I'm using ext3 on my powerbook for a long time no and havn't had any problems.
I read about noatime ext3 mount options and stuff, but such an option for my root fs doesn't feel right. What experience do you guys have with suspending the disk (and resulting laptop-usage increase) in a iBook/Powerbook?
In my experience the most important thing to be able to spin down the disk is not writeing to it all the time. This can be accopmlished with Jens Axboe's laptop mode patch which is included in latest benh kernels. You have to activate it with a little script (included in the kernel sources) which enables it by setting some /proc entries. Of course not writing the log to disk immediately somehow defeats filesystem journaling :-( but you can have everything at once. With that i can spin down the disk with cpudyn (sone to be packaged for debian). This daemon also slows down the cpu on low cpu load. gaudenz
