3 ms·

What???? There's applications that actually use atime? The only good reason I can think to have it would be a cache or something. Google tells me there's a w

What???? There's applications that actually use atime? The only good reason I can think to have it would be a cache or something. Google tells me there's a way to make maildir work, but I'd never even heard of that program till now so IDK. My solution to disk wear is just to only use 1TB+ SSDs, or, if I'm running directly on a Pi SD card(Which you pretty much have to unless you want to totally defeat the purpose of a Pi being cheap and small and low power), to absolutely plaster the filesystem with ramdisks. logs get one, /tmp gets one, Chromium kiosks are the worst offender, that state gets moved to /dev/shm, etc. Don't forget ~/.cache/lxsession/LXDE/run.log though! It can easily completely fill a disk! Lightweight software seems to often be really bad about this, developers care more about simplicity than whether a flash drive will last 5 years or not. I wish ext4 and ext2 could be replaced. Too bad we don't have anything better, filesystems are all crap. BTRFS has write amplification on small writes, F2FS looks most promising but still has trouble with power loss corruption, ext4 and ext2 don't have compression or CoW, exFAT doesn't have journaling ot anything to protect itself from errors as far as I can tell..

lproven 5y ago
Maildir isn't an application. It's a storage format for email inboxes; multiple email clients support it. Offhand, it's the only thing I know, but yes, it's real and yes it's an issue. I use zram (and tmpfs) on RasPis to provide swap without hammering the µSD card, but the issue with Pis is of course that RAM is scant. The 8GB Pi is impossible to buy at the moment and has been for months; even the 4GB one is in short supply. I am surprised that there doesn't seem to be more effort on Flash-specific general-purpose filesystems, but I'm actively glad ext2 is still a thing. It's perfectly possible to install Linux onto a USB key (not write an ISO and make a bootable key; a full install on USB) and such things can be handy. Ext2 is faster _and_ reduces wear on the medium. Like installing Windows onto an external drive on an Intel Mac, the trick is to attach the drive to a VM, and then install the OS inside the VM. Then, once 1st stage install is done (Windows) or once it's installed (Linux, because there is only 1 stage), just boot the machine off the USB drive directly, without virtualisation.

lproven 5y ago

Maildir isn't an application. It's a storage format for email inboxes; multiple email clients support it. Offhand, it's the only thing I know, but yes, it's real and yes it's an issue. I use zram (and tmpfs) on RasPis to provide swap without hammering the µSD card, but the issue with Pis is of course that RAM is scant. The 8GB Pi is impossible to buy at the moment and has been for months; even the 4GB one is in short supply. I am surprised that there doesn't seem to be more effort on Flash-specific general-purpose filesystems, but I'm actively glad ext2 is still a thing. It's perfectly possible to install Linux onto a USB key (not write an ISO and make a bootable key; a full install on USB) and such things can be handy. Ext2 is faster _and_ reduces wear on the medium. Like installing Windows onto an external drive on an Intel Mac, the trick is to attach the drive to a VM, and then install the OS inside the VM. Then, once 1st stage install is done (Windows) or once it's installed (Linux, because there is only 1 stage), just boot the machine off the USB drive directly, without virtualisation.