Hdd Led

[jpmatrix]

hello
i've just installed openbsd 4.0 snapshot on my slc3000 ! works great out of the box, just little troubles  with my rc.rofilesys ;-)

anyway here are my main problems:

1- the hdd led stays lit all the time! is it normal ?

2- suspend just hang the zaurus. i read people with same problem on the forum.

3-can i use 3.8/3.9 compiled packages with this 4.0 ?

4-where can i find more 4.0 bsd packages other than bsd website ?

thanks for your responses

[mathemajikian]

1. The hdd led will remain on since the hdd is always in use when running openbsd on your zaurii.

3. You cannot use packages from older releases on newer releases.

4. Some of the users of this forum have provided packages they have built on their zaurii but I suggest that you use the ports collection and build your own ports/packages.

[jpmatrix]

1. The hdd led will remain on since the hdd is always in use when running openbsd on your zaurii.

isn't that a power issue ?
i find that running openbsd makes my zaurus run on battery shortage so quickly!! isn't it a problem for the hdd too to remain up all the time as it wasn't build for that (i guess) ?
is there a way to just pause the hdd ?

[iamasmith]

1. The hdd led will remain on since the hdd is always in use when running openbsd on your zaurii.

isn't that a power issue ?
i find that running openbsd makes my zaurus run on battery shortage so quickly!! isn't it a problem for the hdd too to remain up all the time as it wasn't build for that (i guess) ?
is there a way to just pause the hdd ?
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1. Quite right the HDD is active all the time and yes it is a power issue, however, this is a full blown operating system and not something aimed just at PDAs. The installation that you get  'out of the box' is the same install that you get if you install on a PC, VAX, SparcStation etc.

2. The only way of 'pausing the hdd' would be to run from a ram disk. Basically to run OpenBSD without having the disk run all the time you need to stop logging and swap as well as all read/write operations that occur as a normal consequence of running the OS on the disk. With some heavy customisation you may succeed in removing all the writes from the basic install, however, it may be almost impossible to stop all reads on the drive without, as I say, moving a significant portion of the file system to a ram based file system. Since the zaurus is fairly short on ram for a BSD system anyway I suggest this isn't the optimal way to go.

Also note that the flash chips aren't supported by OpenBSD and aren't used at all. Simply enabling them (writing a driver) and running them as disk devices wouldn't be great since UFS doesn't implement write spreading like jffs2 does and OpenBSD doesn't have jffs2 support.

-Andy

[mathemajikian]

Also note that most of the time wd0 is in a suspended state which means it's not spinning or utlizing that much power. You can also improve battery life by enabling wd0's cache ( 128 KB ) write capabilities which are disabled by default. This will prevent the drive from having to spin up each time you type something on the screen. (I think, correct me on this if I'm wrong) This can be enabled by adding the following line somewhere in rc.local:

Code: [Select]

echo 'setting up wd0'
atactl /dev/wd0 writecacheenable && echo 'writecacheenable'
From the atactl manual page:

writecacheenable
              Enables the write cache on the specified device (if supported).
              This may increase performance, however data still in the de-
              vice's cache at powerdown may be lost.  The wd(4) driver per-
              forms a cache flush automatically before shutdown.

[mathemajikian]

hello
i've just installed openbsd 4.0 snapshot on my slc3000 ! works great out of the box, just little troubles  with my rc.rofilesys ;-)

anyway here are my main problems:

1- the hdd led stays lit all the time! is it normal ?

This has been corrected finally. Now the HDD LED will only illuminate when there is actual hard drive activity.