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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!"
Considering this was a fault of the manufacturers, this story is pure and total flamebait. Just don't bother feeding the trolls; don't reply.
Well, one can squarely blame the HD manufacturers (look at the Seagate disaster) and say they need to fix their hardware.
However, when your stuff doesnt work, regardless who's fault it is, it's still broken. And in cases like Ubuntu vs Windows: it'll work in Windows and not work in Ubuntu. Who do you think the user will fault?
ObUserStory: I bought a T61 Thinkpad. Worked fine in Windows, and not so well in Ubuntu. What didnt work? The right side USB ports. If I was a regular user, I'd remove Ubuntu and put Windows back on. However, Im stubborn... and know that Linux shouldnt go disabling ports at seemingly random. Turns out, it was a ACPI bios bug that did so :( So a BIOS update did the trick and fixed everything.
So yes, it may be a manufacturers fault, but that's not where the blame gets placed all the time..
Marcus smokes all of the crack in the walls and goes on a rampage after discovering a bug in his OS causes his laptop to die.
He shoots everybody in the house before beginning an armed standoff with the SWAT team, then kills 3 cops(one in full riot gear) before a sniper in a police helicopter shoots the gun out of his hand. Stunned but unharmed, Marcus then slips and falls off the roof into his unkempt wading pool before he is transanally disemboweled by the pool's drain.
Ostensibly, yes. In reality, those laptops had been making much more use of ReiserFS's best friend. I heard they even planned to run off with him.
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.
The title and article summary is misleading. It shortens the life of the hard drive, not the laptop itself. Hard drives are cheap, and on most laptops as easy to swap out as the battery with screwdriver in hand.
Its not like Ubuntu is killing the motherboard or screen, its the Hard Drive.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
And don't forget to cue the spelling/grammar Nazis.
Fixed it for ya.
Does it bother anyone that Ubuntu, the community's duly annointed challenger to Microsoft hegemony, had an outstanding bug for fourteen months whose effect was to damage hardware? That's pretty terrible.
Fedora 9 and 10 click pretty much as much...
For something that was all over the internet, it took an awfully long time to fix.
If you can't handle non-perfect hardware or firmware, then you don't make operating systems.
I don't know, quite a few companies in the past have made a pretty successful run of it.
"transanally disemboweled"
Eww! Eww! Eww!
Eeeeewwwww!!
Ewwww!
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Obviously. But the story's still flamebait. Want a non-flamebait title? "Ubuntu Workaround for Laptop-Killing BIOS Bug Released". See the difference? Subtle but important.
well, in a way. The problem is that the drive makers optimized their power saving algorithms for Windows disk access patterns - as you would expect them to since it is 85% of the market. And they didn't provide knobs to twist for other OSes - including new, more efficient versions of Windows.
The irony is that Linux runs afoul of the hard drive power saving tuning because it is too efficient. The gaps between disk accesses are too long, and trigger a head unload while the OS is still active.
The best fix would be to twist a knob to adjust the inactivity timer - but that isn't available. So the simplest fix is to disable power saving on the disk - fine for laptops used as portable desktops. To keep drive power saving without unloading/loading the heads constantly, you have to configure "laptop mode", which uses memory to cache reads/collect writes so as to provide something like 30 minutes between disk accesses for typical word processing/browsing activities.
I've thought about writing a background process (in python or your favorite script language) that monitors iostat - and reads a raw sector every 9 seconds to keep the disk from thinking we are inactive. At the same time, we have our own Linux oriented inactivity timer, and stop reading the raw sectors when the system is truly inactive (other than our own reads).
How can this be modded "insightful"? When systems break down that run other OS's, the hardware or drivers are typically blamed. That's fair territory. But when it's Linux, the double standard kicks in and it's the OS's fault? If the hardware manufacturers aren't supplying proper workarounds or fixes, or aren't even providing the source for their BIOS/Drivers/whatever to the folks who are apparently now expected to fix it, then how the hell are they supposed to make it all work? Magic wands? Insightful my ass. I'd mod this "ignorant".
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.
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.