[systemd-devel] systemd and hdparm

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 22.06.12 11:29, Paul Menzel (paulepanter at users.sourceforge.net) wrote:

> Dear systemd folks, dear Mark (upstream), dear Stephen (Debian),
> 
> 
> before going further about this what is your recommended way to deal
> with hdparm setting up options for block devices?
> 
> Arch Linux does not seem to ship any init.d scripts/service files for
> hdparm [1][2] and Fedora does not either [3].
> 
> The Debian package of hdparm [4] ships an init.d script [5] which reads
> values from a config file and tunes the devices appropriately, which I
> all attached from version 9.39-1.
> 
> Besides that drives should be set up „optimally“ in the first place by
> the Linux kernel, how should users be able to set up there drives?

The Debian approach is majorly flawed. It assumes that there was a time
at boot where all devices have been probed and wants to be started after
that. In real life however no such point in time exists, and devices can
come and go at any time. This means that (if at all) hdparm needs to be
invoked from udev rules, so that the changes are applied as the hw
becomes available. 

Practically however I'd assume that nowadays the kernel defaults should
be good enough to not require any explicit configuration infrastructure
for this. Instead, people should simply write udev rules that invoke
hdparm with the desired parameters, and that should be all that is
necessary.

Or in other words: use the udev rules files as configuration files and
get rid of anything else, in particular if that'd be distro-specific.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.