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Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug Fixed
jeevesbond writes "Back in October of 2007 we discussed a bug that would dramatically shorten the life of laptops using Ubuntu. Ubuntu users will be glad to know that a fix has finally been released for Ubuntu versions 9.04, 8.10 and 8.04 (LTS). However, as this fix is not yet in the update repositories, anyone wishing to test it should follow these instructions for enabling the 'proposed' repository. Report your results on the original bug report. Happy testing!"
The fix is already included in the accepted updates:
acpi-support (0.114-0intrepid1) intrepid-proposed; urgency=low
* {ac,battery,resume,start}.d/90-hdparm.sh: don't just check whether
laptop-mode is configured to control the drives, also check whether
laptop-mode itself is *enabled*. Finally closes LP: #59695.
-- Steve Langasek Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:50:10 +0000
Just run apt-get update && apt-get install acpi-support.
Fedora 9 and 10 click pretty much as much...
Yea, my ASUS g1sn has a BIOS bug that ASUS won't be fixing in the forseeable future, where it maps memory addresses wrong so if I get all 4GB of RAM in here, I can't install my nVidia drivers in Linux (it works in Windows, but Linux trusts the computer more).
Really makes you wish hardware manufacturers would step it up.
Trolling again on slashdot are we Mr. Gates? If you had been paying attention, you would have known about it, since it was all over the internet when it happened.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Just in the last two days I've tried to install three versions of Ubuntu on a Toshiba Satellite laptop, and every attempt failed with a blank screen of death in the middle of the process. I tried 7.1, 8.04, and the latest nightly build (first two Desktop versions, the latter Alternate of course). This is an old laptop from 2001, a model 1805-S203, so there's no cutting-edge hardware that should be causing a problem, yet the installs failed spectacularly.
By contrast, BOTH Windows 2000 and MEPIS Linux version 7 were able to install.
I have to tell you, this has shaken my confidence in open source operating systems quite a bit.
Oh wait, it's kdawson.
It shortens the life of your HD, not the laptop itself, you chimp.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The funny thing is that the actul bug is an urban myth. People claim that once your hard drive reaches 300k parks it will fail. Note that at the start they were claiming the number to be 100k and now are claiming 600k due to the simple fact that a huge number of people showed up with the number being well over million on perfectly functioning drives.
The drives parked heads when not in use, sometimes, several times a minute, some of them clicked when they did so. It is a feature that reduces power use and protects the hard drive from sudden movement and impacts. It is NOT a bug.
All the claims that it will make you hard drive fail in a year are false and are made by people that have no a slightest clue of hard drive design.
You would find this out due to returns. There really are only a handful of laptop manufacturers who sell to the OEM brands you know (Dell, HP, etc). If a model has a component failing at a higher rate than normal, the OEM/ODM will begin investigating what is going wrong.
In the case of Windows, we are also able to correlate crash information to drivers and hardware, and determine problems this way.
I work for Microsoft as a technical account manager (TAM) - and work with OEM/OEM/IHV communities on issues like this. There are *many* patches to Windows which include workarounds for hardware issues - something that is both good and bad. Good because an end user is less likely to get screwed; bad because vendors who tend to make crap hardware stay in business.
I followed the instructions on Ubuntu's forums (what a pain to locate the actual instructions) (I transcribed what I did and will post them).
The actual problem was that manufactures have messed with their drives and altered the head parking timeout into a "detect if windows went to sleep" method. Basically Windows writes to the disk *all the time* until it sleeps, so the best way to minimize disk use is to park the head almost instantly after any inactivity, as that will park it asap when it sleeps. Furthermore at least 2 manufactures used the timeout control as <= 195 == "on" and >195 == "off".
Ubuntu/Linux wrote a lot less often, but plenty anyway, like every 15 seconds (doing stupid stuff like writing log files). So the head unparked every 15 seconds.
The fact that Windows "worked" led a lot of people to think Windows was doing secret messing with the drives to turn on extra modes that were not in the documentation, and that Ubuntu could not be fixed until this secret was found. However I think somebody could have figured out that it was not doing anything, there were programs (ported from Ubuntu, apparently!) for reading the disk settings under Windows.
It was also known immediatly that setting the disk timeout to 255 stopped this. Who cares if this was not the "secret Windows setting", it was certainly better than how Ubuntu was working at that time. This was known the same day the bug was first talked about! Ubuntu should have immediatly patched it, but somehow the fact that this was not "ideal" caused them to delay for 14 months! That is really bad, guys! I "fixed" mine as best I could with a program I had to run every time I opened the lid (because some stupid startup thing kept turning the timeout back on, and the only way to run my program last was to manually run it!) I eventually decided to go through the hair of actually fixing it and killing off that other thing that tried to do it.
There seemed to be a bunch of conflicting programs, all of them trying to set the disk timeout to 128 or 2. You had to get *all* of them (see next posting for what I did). This is what made it Ubuntu-specific. I sure hope this patch straightens it out so exactly ONE service, and exactly ONE file in /etc, controls the disk timeout!
Yea you can blame Windows all you want, but this was really, really, bad!
And I sure hope the update (which I just did) did not get screwed up by trying to merge with all the changes I did. Have not really checked yet. What a PITA. If they had put out a patch immediatly then they would not have to patch systems that have a hundred different solutions on them.
Hard drives have "recommended" power-saving values specified in their firmware that say after x minutes of idle time, power me down! Ubuntu used these values.
It turns out these default values were way too low (1-5 minutes), so drives would power off and on very frequently, which shortened their lives.