[PATCH 4/4] Add documentation for hard disk shock protection interface

[Elias Oltmanns]

Put some information (and pointers to more) into the kernel's doc tree,
describing briefly the interface to the kernel's disk head unloading
facility. Information about how to set up a complete shock protection
system under GNU/Linux can be found on the web and is referenced
accordingly.

Signed-off-by: Elias Oltmanns <eo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---

 Documentation/laptops/disk-shock-protection.txt |  131 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 files changed, 131 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/laptops/disk-shock-protection.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/laptops/disk-shock-protection.txt b/Documentation/laptops/disk-shock-protection.txt
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+Hard disk shock protection
+==========================
+
+Author: Elias Oltmanns <eo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+Last modified: 2008-08-28
+
+
+0. Contents
+-----------
+
+1. Intro
+2. The interface
+3. References
+4. CREDITS
+
+
+1. Intro
+--------
+
+ATA/ATAPI-7 specifies the IDLE IMMEDIATE command with unload feature.
+Issuing this command should cause the drive to switch to idle mode and
+unload disk heads. This feature is being used in modern laptops in
+conjunction with accelerometers and appropriate software to implement
+a shock protection facility. The idea is to stop all I/O operations on
+the internal hard drive and park its heads on the ramp when critical
+situations are anticipated. The desire to have such a feature
+available on GNU/Linux systems has been the original motivation to
+implement a generic disk head parking interface in the Linux kernel.
+Please note, however, that other components have to be set up on your
+system in order to get disk shock protection working (see section
+3. Referneces below for pointers to more information about that).
+
+
+2. The interface
+----------------
+
+The interface works as follows: Writing an integer value to
+/sys/block/*/device/unload_heads will take the heads of the respective
+drive off the platter and block all I/O operations for the specified
+number of seconds. When the timeout expires and no further disk head
+park request has been issued in the meantime, normal operation will be
+resumed. The maximal value accepted for a timeout is 30 seconds.
+However, you can always reset a running timer to any value between 0
+and 30 by issuing a subsequent head park request before the timer of
+the previous one has expired. In particular, the total timeout can
+exceed 30 seconds and, more importantly, you can abort a timer and
+resume normal operation immediately by specifying a timeout of 0.
+Reading from /sys/block/*/device/unload_heads will report zero if no
+timer is running and the number of seconds until the timer expires
+otherwise.
+
+There is a technical detail of this implementation that may cause some
+confusion and should be discussed here. When a head park request has
+been issued to a device successfully, all I/O operations on the
+controller port this device is attached to will be deferred. That is
+to say, any other device that may be connected to the same port will
+be affected too. For that reason, head parking requests will be sent
+to all devices that support this feature sharing the same port before
+that port is taken offline, as it were. As far as PATA (old style IDE)
+configurations are concerned, there can only be two devices attached
+to any single port. In SATA world we have port multipliers which means
+that a user issued head parking request to one device may actually
+result in stopping I/O to a whole bunch of deviices. Hwoever, since
+this feature is supposed to be used on laptops and does not seem to be
+very useful in any other environment, there will be mostly one device
+per port. Even if the CD/DVD writer happens to be connected to the
+same port as the hard drive, it generally *should* recover just fine
+from the occasional buffer under-run incurred by a head park request
+to the HD.
+
+Write access to /sys/block/*/device/unload_heads is denied with
+-EOPNOTSUPP if the device does not support the unload feature. Read
+access, on the other hand, is granted on all devices, so it is easy to
+find out whether two devices share the same port and are subject to
+the limitation described in the previous paragraph. Just do, for
+example:
+
+# echo 30 > /sys/block/sda/device/unload_heads
+
+and check whether
+
+# cat /sys/block/device/sdb/unload_heads
+
+gives you a nonzero value (assuming, of course, there actually are
+devices sda and sdb up and running in your system).
+
+Finally, there are some hard drives that only comply with an earlier
+version of the ATA standard than ATA-7, but do support the unload
+feature nonetheless. Unfortunately, there is no safe way Linux can
+detect these devices, so you won't be able to write to the
+unload_heads attribute. If you know that your device really does
+support the unload feature (for instance, because the vendor of your
+laptop or the hard drive itself told you so), the you can tell the
+kernel to enable the usage of this feature for that drive by means of
+the unload_feature attribute:
+
+# echo 1 > /sys/block/*/device/unload_feature
+
+will enable the feature on that particular device, and giving 0
+instead of 1 will disable it again.
+
+
+3. References
+-------------
+
+There are several laptops from different brands featuring shock
+protection capabilities. As manufacturers have refused to support open
+source development of the required software components so far, Linux
+support for shock protection varies considerably between different
+hardware implementations. Ideally, this section should contain a list
+of pointers at different projects aiming at an implementation of shock
+protection on different systeems. Unfortunately, I only know of a
+single project which, although still considered experimental, is fit
+for use. Please feel free to add projects that have been the victims
+of my ignorance.
+
+- http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/HDAPS
+  See this page for information about Linux support of the hard disk
+  active protection system as implemented in IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads.
+  (FIXME: The information there will have to be updated once this
+  patch has been approved or the user interface has been agreed upon
+  at least.)
+
+
+4. CREDITS
+----------
+
+This implementation of disk head parking has been based on a patch
+originally published by Jon Escombe <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>. Assisted by
+various kernel developers, the author of this document has rewritten
+the original patch in order to make it fit for upstream submission.


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