Commit a45e3c5c authored by Bart Samwel's avatar Bart Samwel Committed by Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] laptop-mode documentation update

The laptop mode docs don't say that no kernel configuration changes are
needed to use laptop mode.  That's caused some people to look for the
option.  This patch makes the doc explicitly mention the lack of an option.
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
parent 9f763dbd
......@@ -28,8 +28,9 @@ Contents
The short story
---------------
If you just want to use it, run the laptop_mode control script (which is included
at the end of this document) as follows:
To use laptop mode, you don't need to set any kernel configuration options
or anything. You simply need to run the laptop_mode control script (which
is included in this document) as follows:
# laptop_mode start
......@@ -78,12 +79,13 @@ Caveats
The details
-----------
Laptop-mode is controlled by the flag /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. When this
flag is set, any physical disk read operation (that might have caused the
hard disk to spin up) causes Linux to flush all dirty blocks. The result
of this is that after a disk has spun down, it will not be spun up anymore
to write dirty blocks, because those blocks had already been written
immediately after the most recent read operation
Laptop-mode is controlled by the flag /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. This flag is
present for all kernels that have the laptop mode patch, regardless of any
configuration options. When the flag is set, any physical disk read operation
(that might have caused the hard disk to spin up) causes Linux to flush all dirty
blocks. The result of this is that after a disk has spun down, it will not be spun
up anymore to write dirty blocks, because those blocks had already been written
immediately after the most recent read operation.
To increase the effectiveness of the laptop_mode strategy, the laptop_mode
control script increases dirty_expire_centisecs and dirty_writeback_centisecs in
......
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