Ubuntu 14.04 LTS supports TRIM on SSD drives

http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2013/12/ubuntu-14-04-lts-supports-trim-ssd-drives/

by maus80 • 13 years ago

98 76 13 years ago

leaseweblabs.com

mpweiher• 13 years ago

tl;dr "Embarrassingly late, but at least in time for 14.04 LTS."

btian• 13 years ago

TRIM has been supported for ages, just not by default.

eropple2• 13 years ago

For consumer software, if it's not the default, it may as well not exist. And no, Linux is not an exception to this.

wfunction11• 13 years ago

Instead of being happy, I'm rather horrified to learn that this hasn't been supported until now.

mkl• 13 years ago

It has been supported for ages, this is just making it automatic. From the article: "SSDs are now being trimmed automatically out of the box".

wfunction11• 13 years ago

Well, if I hadn't known about it until now, there's not much between the two scenarios for me, is there?

eonil• 13 years ago

And then, this article is hooking me with title…

silisili• 13 years ago

No kidding. SSD are easy to detect. We've had this feature in Antergos since our new installer. In fact, when people claimed we were using the Ubuntu installer, this was one of the features we brought up. Guess we'll need another :)

altero• 13 years ago

Trim has been already supported for years. It just was not on by default.

cookiecaper2• 13 years ago

Mountain out of a mole hill. Glad someone got some sense knocked into them and enable this flag by default, but Linux has supported TRIM for a long time. It was just a matter of adding the mount option.

And by the way, last I checked there's still a long laundry list of non-default incantations to optimize SSD usage on Windows, where you're stuck harder because you don't have control over things like the I/O scheduler.

wfunction11• 13 years ago

last I checked there's still a long laundry list of non-default incantations to optimize SSD usage on Windows

Would you mind listing them?

shocks• 13 years ago

Here is a great guide: http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-o...

maus802• 13 years ago

AFAIK the "fstrim" option will be used and the "discard" flag will not be enabled by default.

coldtea• 13 years ago

It was just a matter of adding the mount option.

I find this JWZ quote applicable: You have invoked the "Oh, but there's a preference to turn off that stupid behavior" defense. I am showering you with negativity.

(well, in this case it's about turning the right behavior on, but still).

maus802• 13 years ago

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has TRIM support for SSD drives out of the box. No need to setup a cron with the "fstrim" command or set the fstab "discard" option, like in earlier versions.

mrinterweb• 13 years ago

That reminds me that I need to enable TRIM on my Ubuntu SSD. I usually do it, but I had forgot to do it with my recent install. I've used this article in the past (http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in-ubun...). It is fun to measure your IOPS before and after.

hansjorg• 13 years ago

That article suggests enabling automatic trim with the discard option, but that's not recommended any longer.

A more up to date article: http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim

bad_user2• 13 years ago

That article is useless for dm-crypt encrypted volumes.

saboot• 13 years ago

Does this support encrypted drives? I had a really big pain trying to support an encrypted ssd under rhel 6, I gave up after an entire day of work.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

Trim gives out the block usage map. You may not want to do that on encrypted drives.

tombrossman• 13 years ago

Encrypted drives are problematic. I've found it easier to just run fstrim manually once in a while.

jberryman• 13 years ago

Can anyone comment on the contrary advice here, which is referenced from the debian SSD Optimization wiki page?:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html

martey• 13 years ago

As befits a post on the linux-raid mailing list, that advice seems to be primarily concerned with using SSDs in a RAID array. I suspect that most users have only one SSD and plan on using most (if not all) of their drive's space.

The Debian wiki page you mentioned [0] was changed from saying TRIM "is not strictly necessary" to "is not needed" if your SSD has enough free space. The editor wrote that the section was rewritten to ensure consistent style, [1] which suggests that they probably did not mean to change that sentence's meaning.

[0] https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&...

PeterWhittaker5• 13 years ago

So it's news that a feature supported on other platforms for anymore from months to years [1] will be supported on Ubuntu 5 months from now?

Huh. Colour me unimpressed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_%28computing%29

Full disclosure: I was an Ubuntu user and tester (signed the c-o-c years ago) for years, switched to OSX on an Air a few months back, and cannot imagine going back to an inferior user experience on inferior hardware. Open source OS was an interesting experiment, begun to ensure access to my data, but given cloud apps with export capabilities and native OSS apps, I cannot imagine wanting to suffer another moment with an OSS user desktop. Server maybe. But even there my conviction levels drop....

csense• 13 years ago

Have you tried distros other than Ubuntu and desktop environments other than Unity?

Also, can you be specific about how Linux gave you an "inferior user experience?"

PeterWhittaker5• 13 years ago

I ran Ubuntu with gnome after Unity came out, tried Linux Mint, LMDE, pure Debian, then back to pure Ubuntu with Unity. Nothing worked as well in 2013 on my several year old laptop as it had several years before, when I first got it - sluggish, slower, "crufty" feel.

When it came time to upgrade hardware, nothing rivaled the Air in terms of weight, capabilities, "feel".

I thought it would take me longer to feel "at home" on OSX, since I'd been a UNIX guy for ages, and was quite comfortable with XP, Win7, and, of course, Linux.

But it took minutes. Many, many "oh wow" moments. Right now, I am 3-fingering back and forth between FF full screen as I write this and FF streaming a bowl game. Gestures are the bomb.

Getting Linux to the point where it "just works" like my Mac just works takes time. My Mac "just works" out of the box. The longest thing it took me to figure out was how to get tab completion to ignore case.

And that's another thing: The OSX community is more up to date and more consistent on their platform than the Linux community. And they're more polite.

Google the same thing on both platforms. Under Linux, you'll find many old and badly wrong answers and many more "I think it's this" written by people who barely understand the question and haven't bothered to test their hypothesis. More recent answers will generally be worse, sadly. And there will be much snark. Much much much.

The answers from OSX users will be fresher and more consistent. It used to take me hours to wade through all of the Linux resources to figure out where the quality lay.

It takes minutes on OSX - the community is simply better and more consistently informed, and more polite and more helpful.

EDIT: Bear in mind that "the user experience" includes the hardware. This beast is just that - a beast, and a very light one at that. I never get the impression that I'm going to break my machine or that it will respond oddly. Overall, the OSX GUI plus UNIX under the covers with all the CLI I love plus the Air HW is an awesome UX.

jorgecastillo• 13 years ago

Depending on your use OSS might be an inferior solution to your needs specially if you're mainly a desktop user, but on the server OSS rules. OSS is not for everyone but if you need something custom nothing beats it, OSS is not about convenience is about flexibility. OSS gives you options that are simply nonexistent in proprietary equivalents. I can't imagine why anyone would choose to use a non OSS stack in a server unless they are already heavily invested in proprietary technology.

PeterWhittaker5• 13 years ago

Fair point. I should have specified that I was referring to personal servers - OSX Mavericks server edition is pretty cool. For enterprise, different question, different answers.

trycatch2• 13 years ago

I was an Ubuntu user and tester (signed the c-o-c years ago) for years
tester

That was likely the problem. People invest a lot of time in their OS, of course sooner or later they get burned out and fed up with all that, and then they move to OS X/Windows disappointed in Linux in general. You don't have to be a tester for Ubuntu (or other Linux distro), you can just use it with very little maintenance. Of course, you can select some more complex path with desktop Linux, but you absolutely don't have to do that.

PeterWhittaker5• 13 years ago

That's a good point - but truth be told, I'd stopped testing a few years ago. I really only threw that out to show "my commitment" :-> - for a couple of years I did quite a lot of it - but work and other bits of life required me to wind down, so in the last few years, I've been trying to be "just a dumb user".

Being a dumb user - and a dumb power user - are easier under OSX, it's a lot easier to tweak than Unity, ironically - and needs less tweaking.

lucb1e• 13 years ago

inferior hardware

For an inferior price, you should add to that. It's kind of obvious that expensive products have decent hardware.

I'm not against apple and this is not Apple bashing (I'm even considering buying a Macbook) but telling the whole truth.

PeterWhittaker5• 13 years ago

I cannot find anything on the PC side that rivals this stuff. $1000 buys something that feels solid, really well built. I've looked, I really wanted to stay on Linux, I was even willing to pay the Windows tax (but wasn't looking forward to the tweaking that was getting more and more necessary)...

...until I switched. Now I cannot imagine going back.

eropple2• 13 years ago

Could you find a similarly-specced, similarly-built ultrabook to the 13" Macbook Air at a significantly lower price? Because I've looked and I can't; the "Mac tax" is largely a thing of the past.

vidarh4• 13 years ago

For my part, I use ubuntu at home and OS X at work, have done for the last 8 years. And not a day go by that I'm not swearing at OS X for being unresponsive or otherwise annoying me, something that happens far more rarely with my lower powered home laptop running Ubuntu.

I used to have OS X at home for 3+ years too, but that's not likely to happen again, and each OS X and Ubuntu upgrade makes it seem less and less likely to me that I'd consider giving OS X another chance at home.

I have a hard time even imagining why anyone would prefer OS X unless there are very specific OS X applications you need, rather than OS features.

salient• 13 years ago

Now, if they can adopt F2FS (flash friendly file system) for SSD's, that would be neat, too. On Motorola's latest phones and in benchmarks it shows substantial performance difference (~50 percent more on average or so).

nailk• 13 years ago

Wondering when they're going to support Trim for Software Raid?

knappador• 13 years ago

# cat /etc/fstab

...defaults,noatime,discard,barrier=0,commit=600

Linux consumers...

shurcooL• 13 years ago

This reminded me to do the chore again.

http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png

suprjami• 13 years ago

What a terrible linkbait title.

This implies that Ubuntu hasn't "supported" SSDs and the discard mount option. That's inaccurate, TRIM has been in Linux since kernel 2.6.28–25 released in Dec 2008.

A more accurate title would be "Ubuntu 14.04 adds fstrim cron job, so you don't need to mount with discard anymore if you don't want to".

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS supports TRIM on SSD drives

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