Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management settings!

The following things might instead cause aggressive power management settings :

  • your (laptop) harddrive firmware might have aggressive power management defaults (operating system independent)
  • your (laptop) BIOS might set your harddrive to use aggressive power management (operating system independent)
  • you might have enabled laptop-mode in /etc/default/acpi-support (disabled by default) which will set your harddrive to use aggressive power management

Read here what Matthew Garret an experienced and well known Ubuntu Developer has said about this problem.

I’m afraid that quite some people are getting a high Load_Cycle_Count because their laptop (BIOS or harddrive firmware) uses too aggressive powermanagement. That’s why I think “wishlist” status for this bug is too low. IMHO Ubuntu should correct mistakes made by BIOS or harddrive firmware.

These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn’t override these settings. I won’t blog again about this problem until new information arises. I’m a big fan of Ubuntu. I don’t want to see Ubuntu hurt because it’s not Ubuntu who is setting these aggressive power management defaults.

People with laptops who haven’t enabled laptop-mode and think they are suffering from this problem might consider adding the following information to the bug report :

  • the output of $sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
  • the age of your disk
  • an estimate of the total hours your disk has been running since you started using it (to compare to Power_on_Hours because that value might be off)
  • an estimate of the average increase of Load_Cycle_Count during one hour on AC (before applying any “ugly” fixes)

I blogged earlier about this problem :

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Original Story: Ubuntu Demon's blog