[Bug 952556] Re: [Precise] [Hardware-killer] HD restarts every few seconds

Tue May 15 18:42:05 UTC 2012

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 08:20:42AM -0000, Neil Price wrote:
> I might be missing something, apologies if i am, but I notice that for
> Precise a decision was made to define a value for -S, in /lib/hdparm
> /hdparm-functions, when on battery to -S36. From Dagnachewl's comment
> (70) it would seem that it's the defining of or value of -S that's still
> causing issues for some.

It's incredibly unlikely that this is the cause of the problems some people
are still seeing.  It's more likely that the affected users simply have
problematic handling of -B128 - as Dagnachew's output in comment #55 shows,
-B128 gives him "Advanced power management level: 1".  I'm not sure if this
is in spec for the drives to do, but it's certainly unhelpful, and it seems
the *only* way to reliably prevent spin up/spin down nonsense on some drives
is to disable APM entirely with -B254.  Fixing this is out of scope for the
present bug report, which was about the behavior regression on non-"green"
drives caused by the move from -B128 to -B127.

So other issues are best addressed by separate bug reports.  We'll need to
gather a lot of information here before we dare making further changes - as
I said earlier, there's no magic setting that will work correctly across all
drives, so we need to be careful that as we tune things, we don't regress
behavior for other users (either in terms of power savings or in terms of
drive wear and tear).

In the meantime, users who find that -B128 causes their disks to spin down
too aggressively should probably just set apm_battery=254 in
/etc/hdparm.conf.

> For anyone who has already updated hdparm to version '9.37-ubuntu3.1'
> and still experiencing early spindowns I would try commenting out (by
> preceeding with #) or removing the line "hdparm_set_option -S36" from
> /lib/hdparm/hdparm-functions. This should effectively revert hdparm-
> functions to pre-Precise settings - removing any spindown time.

Since -S36 is a spindown time of 3 minutes, I don't think this setting is
related to the behavior users are seeing.  If it *is*, then those drives are
operating contrary to the spec and users should complain to their hardware
vendors and demand firmware updates.

> Steve: thanks for the update, works great for me! Maybe the wording of the
> change in the changelog needs updating.  Instead of '...drives are
> spinning back "up" so frequently' shouldn't it be '...drives are spinning
> "down" so soon'?

No, that wording is deliberate.  Ultimately, the real bug here is not that
we're spinning the drives down; the bug is that we're unable to *keep* them
spun down on a typical desktop.  There's no justification for having to hit
the disk any more frequently than once every 5-10 minutes on a default
install, and the fact that we do is a bug.  It might be a kernel bug, or an
application bug, or a filesystem bug - it's difficult to say categorically
because everyone's usage patterns seem to be different.  But ultimately, the
goal here should be to get better at our disk handling so that it doesn't
matter that we're spinning the disk down.

> It's that the drive has spun down after only a few seconds of idle (with
> -B127 and -S36) that leads to it having to spin back up so frequently.

If the drive is actually spinning down with -S36, rather than simply parking
the heads, that's a firmware bug anyway.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/952556

Title:
  [Precise] [Hardware-killer] HD restarts every few seconds

Status in “hdparm” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “hdparm” source package in Precise:
  Fix Released
Status in “hdparm” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  [Impact]
  This issue has the potential to cause additional mechanical wear and tear on rotational hard drives by causing them to spin up and down more frequently than in previous Ubuntu releases.  While the intent of a development change in the precise cycle was to allow drives to spin down sooner and stay spun down, in practice users report their drives spin back up quickly.  Until this is resolved, an aggressive spin-down policy is dangerous for hardware and inappropriate.

  [Test Case]
  1. On a laptop with a rotational hard drive, unplug main power and run on battery.
  2. Run sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda|grep Load_Cycle_Count repeatedly, to observe that the count increases once every few seconds.
  3. Install hdparm from precise-proposed.
  4. Plug the laptop back into main power, then unplug it again.
  5. Run the command from step 2 again.  Observe that the count is no longer increasing or is increasing much more slowly.  (Note that the precise behavior will vary from hard drive to hard drive, and on some systems there will be no difference visible at all.)

  [Regression Potential]
  For some users the current setting does not meaningfully increase wear and tear on their drives, but changing it will increase power consumption.  This seems to be a necessary evil since there's no single power saving setting that works well for all drives.

  Hi,

  After update from Oneiric to Precise Beta 1, kernel 3.2.0-18-generic,
  I notice that, when on battery, my Dell XPS  M1330 laptop has its HD
  spin down, then restart, very, very, very often, which means several
  times per minute.

  At this pace the HD won't live long, and this reminds to me a problem
  we had few years ago with "disk killers" linuxes that were
  unloading/reloading the HD heads much too often, killing disks in a
  couple of months.

  So I prefer to ring the alarm bell early...

  Upgrading from Oneiric to Precise I didn't change any power management
  parameter, but it definitely didn't do this before (and still doesn't
  do this on other distros I have on multiboot, so that's no hardware
  issue, only Precise does that on my machine...)

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
  Package: linux-image-3.2.0-18-generic 3.2.0-18.28
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-18.28-generic 3.2.9
  Uname: Linux 3.2.0-18-generic i686
  AlsaVersion: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.24.
  ApportVersion: 1.94.1-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: i386
  AudioDevicesInUse:
   USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
   /dev/snd/controlC0:  michel     3044 F.... pulseaudio
  CRDA:
   country FR:
    (2402 - 2482 @ 40), (N/A, 20)
    (5170 - 5250 @ 40), (N/A, 20)
    (5250 - 5330 @ 40), (N/A, 20), DFS
    (5490 - 5710 @ 40), (N/A, 27), DFS
  Card0.Amixer.info:
   Card hw:0 'Intel'/'HDA Intel at 0xf6dfc000 irq 46'
     Mixer name	: 'Silicon Image SiI1392 HDMI'
     Components	: 'HDA:83847616,1028020a,00100201 HDA:10951392,1028020a,00100000'
     Controls      : 33
     Simple ctrls  : 19
  CheckboxSubmission: 1ea6109db29b53f721a523a77b7f3abf
  CheckboxSystem: d00f84de8a555815fa1c4660280da308
  Date: Sun Mar 11 22:25:00 2012
  EcryptfsInUse: Yes
  HibernationDevice: RESUME=UUID=0e7ded16-c4fc-4f81-8562-3cb1196809d3
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
  MachineType: Dell Inc. XPS M1330
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=fr_FR:fr:en_US:en
   TERM=xterm
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcFB: 0 inteldrmfb
  ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.2.0-18-generic root=/dev/mapper/VG1-UBUNTU ro clocksource=hpet quiet splash vt.handoff=7
  RelatedPackageVersions:
   linux-restricted-modules-3.2.0-18-generic N/A
   linux-backports-modules-3.2.0-18-generic  N/A
   linux-firmware                            1.71
  SourcePackage: linux
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-03-10 (1 days ago)
  dmi.bios.date: 12/26/2008
  dmi.bios.vendor: Dell Inc.
  dmi.bios.version: A15
  dmi.board.name: 0N6705
  dmi.board.vendor: Dell Inc.
  dmi.chassis.type: 8
  dmi.chassis.vendor: Dell Inc.
  dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvrA15:bd12/26/2008:svnDellInc.:pnXPSM1330:pvr:rvnDellInc.:rn0N6705:rvr:cvnDellInc.:ct8:cvr:
  dmi.product.name: XPS M1330
  dmi.sys.vendor: Dell Inc.

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