HDAPS

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Revision as of 19:54, 21 January 2006 by Jescombe (Talk | contribs) (Security & Safety)
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HDAPS - IBM Active Protection System Linux Driver

This is the Linux driver for the IBM Active Protection System.

Features

  • prints accelerometer values
  • uses userspace tool to park HD

Project Homepage / Availability

  • Project Homepage
  • The driver is included in the 2.6-mm series of kernels since August, 26th 2005.
  • The driver is now in the mainline (2.6.14).

Status

A driver is included in recent Linux kernels and is actively maintained. However, presently the driver only enables reading of the acceleration data; it does not perform automatic disk head parking. The latter feature is under development. But there are already some useful applications for HDAPS, using the /sys interface it provides. See below.

Disk protection howto

As mentioned above, the hdaps kernel driver is only responsible for reading the accelerometer data and exporting it through the sysfs interface. In order to use this information to protect the disk, some additional steps are required.

  • 1. Download and build the latest disk protection kernel patches. These patches export a sysfs interface that enables an ide or sata disk to be protected by a userspace process.
  • 2. Download and build the hdapsd userspace daemon. This monitors the accelerometer data provided by the hdaps kernel driver, and automatically protects the disk when movement exceeds a user specified threshold.
  • 3. Download and build the gnome panel applet to get a real-time representation of the disk protection status.

The above components are still under development, but are known to work on a variety of thinkpad models. Additonal information and support is available through the hdaps mailing list.

Applications

Security & Safety

Monitoring

  • gkhdaps a GKrellM applet displaying tilt data
  • gnome-tilt a gnome applet showing tilt data

Visualisation

Interesting links related to this project