9 ms·

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS supports TRIM on SSD drives

98 points by maus80 13y ago

mpweiher 13y ago
tl;dr "Embarrassingly late, but at least in time for 14.04 LTS."
- btian 13y ago
  TRIM has been supported for ages, just not by default.
  - eropple 13y 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.
wfunction 13y ago
Instead of being happy, I'm rather horrified to learn that this hasn't been supported until now.
- mkl 13y 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".
  - wfunction 13y ago
    Well, if I hadn't known about it until now, there's not much between the two scenarios for me, is there?
    - Joyfield 13y ago
      You just want to blame someone other than yourself for not knowing stuff, right?
      - momerath 13y ago
        Not everyone has time to know exactly what's supported by every combination of hardware and software they use or might use in the future. Personally, I came under the impression that the major filesystems in linux (or ext4 at the very least) "supported" trim years before I actually got an SSD. When I did, it didn't occur to me that I'd need to provide an option to mount for it to actually use said support. News to me, and I've been using linux since I downloaded SLS floppies from a BBS. As it happens, I'm running Samsung's "flash friendly filesystem" (f2fs) on this machine; I hope I don't need to make sure _it_ is issuing trim instructions.
      - wfunction 13y ago
        > You just want to blame someone other than yourself for not knowing stuff, right? I was going to reply with "I'm a customer, so why should I be expected to know this?" ...but then I realized you wouldn't understand the concept, since Linux is "free", I paid $0.00 as a "customer", and therefore I should shut up because I have no right to be complaining. Right?
        eikenberry 13y ago
        If you don't care to know then you trust the provider to make the decisions for you. The fact that you found out you don't agree with a decision they made shouldn't really surprise you. It is unlikely that you agree with every decision they made.
        wfunction 13y ago
        > If you don't care to know then you trust the provider to make the decisions for you. Yeah, and that's also how your provider convinces you to switch to a different provider.
    - lstamour 13y ago
      As a note for anyone using non-Apple SSDs in OS X, you'll need to enable TRIM yourself (free, sometimes needs re-applying after system updates): http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/ http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/ I run it on all my Macs. :)
  - eonil 13y ago
    And then, this article is hooking me with title…
- axaxs 13y 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 13y ago
Trim has been already supported for years. It just was not on by default.
cookiecaper 13y 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.
- wfunction 13y 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 13y ago
    Here is a great guide: http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-o... :)
    - justin66 13y ago
      I didn't notice any genuinely bad advice when I gave that a quick once-over, but I'm pretty sure none of it is actually necessary to make TRIM work on Windows 7. Verifying the AHCI setting in the BIOS is good advice but might not always be necessary, depending on the SSD.
      - cookiecaper 13y ago
        TRIM is just one component of an optimal SSD configuration, and it's somewhat overrated. It should be on by default, but it's not the only consideration for good SSD performance.
        justin66 13y ago
        Is there a more important factor than TRIM in preventing performance degradation over time? (aside from just not letting the drive get too full) It _all_ might be somewhat overrated. I've certainly never worried much about all this stuff, and my SSDs still perform phenomenally well. I used one in my old Macbook well before OS X supported TRIM and all was well, although I have to admit that on another machine I thought for sure Linux was taking care of TRIM for me. Apparently not.
maus80 13y 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 13y 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-ubuntu-for-better-performance/ http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in-ubun...). It is fun to measure your IOPS before and after.
- hansjorg 13y 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 http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim
  - bad_user 13y ago
    That article is useless for dm-crypt encrypted volumes.
    - cpleppert 13y ago
      You have to disable TRIM on the encrypted filesystem with the discard option in crypttab and then set issue_discards to true in lvm.conf.
saboot 13y 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 13y ago
  Trim gives out the block usage map. You may not want to do that on encrypted drives.
- tombrossman 13y ago
  Encrypted drives are problematic. I've found it easier to just run fstrim manually once in a while.
jberryman 13y 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 http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html
- martey 13y 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 https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&rev2=75 https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&...
PeterWhittaker 13y 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 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....
- lucb1e 13y 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.
  - PeterWhittaker 13y 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.
  - eropple 13y 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.
- csense 13y 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?"
salient 13y 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).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
nailk 13y ago
Wondering when they're going to support Trim for Software Raid?
knappador 13y ago
# cat /etc/fstab ...defaults,noatime,discard,barrier=0,commit=600 Linux consumers...
shurcooL 13y ago
This reminded me to do the chore again. http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png
suprjami 13y 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".

98 points by maus80 13y ago

mpweiher 13y ago

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

btian 13y ago
TRIM has been supported for ages, just not by default.
- eropple 13y 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.

wfunction 13y ago

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

mkl 13y 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".
- wfunction 13y ago
  Well, if I hadn't known about it until now, there's not much between the two scenarios for me, is there?
  - Joyfield 13y ago
    You just want to blame someone other than yourself for not knowing stuff, right?
    - momerath 13y ago
      Not everyone has time to know exactly what's supported by every combination of hardware and software they use or might use in the future. Personally, I came under the impression that the major filesystems in linux (or ext4 at the very least) "supported" trim years before I actually got an SSD. When I did, it didn't occur to me that I'd need to provide an option to mount for it to actually use said support. News to me, and I've been using linux since I downloaded SLS floppies from a BBS. As it happens, I'm running Samsung's "flash friendly filesystem" (f2fs) on this machine; I hope I don't need to make sure _it_ is issuing trim instructions.
    - wfunction 13y ago
      > You just want to blame someone other than yourself for not knowing stuff, right? I was going to reply with "I'm a customer, so why should I be expected to know this?" ...but then I realized you wouldn't understand the concept, since Linux is "free", I paid $0.00 as a "customer", and therefore I should shut up because I have no right to be complaining. Right?
      - eikenberry 13y ago
        If you don't care to know then you trust the provider to make the decisions for you. The fact that you found out you don't agree with a decision they made shouldn't really surprise you. It is unlikely that you agree with every decision they made.
        wfunction 13y ago
        > If you don't care to know then you trust the provider to make the decisions for you. Yeah, and that's also how your provider convinces you to switch to a different provider.
  - lstamour 13y ago
    As a note for anyone using non-Apple SSDs in OS X, you'll need to enable TRIM yourself (free, sometimes needs re-applying after system updates): http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/ http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/ I run it on all my Macs. :)
- eonil 13y ago
  And then, this article is hooking me with title…
axaxs 13y 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 13y ago

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

cookiecaper 13y 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.

wfunction 13y 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 13y ago
  Here is a great guide: http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-o... :)
  - justin66 13y ago
    I didn't notice any genuinely bad advice when I gave that a quick once-over, but I'm pretty sure none of it is actually necessary to make TRIM work on Windows 7. Verifying the AHCI setting in the BIOS is good advice but might not always be necessary, depending on the SSD.
    - cookiecaper 13y ago
      TRIM is just one component of an optimal SSD configuration, and it's somewhat overrated. It should be on by default, but it's not the only consideration for good SSD performance.
      - justin66 13y ago
        Is there a more important factor than TRIM in preventing performance degradation over time? (aside from just not letting the drive get too full) It _all_ might be somewhat overrated. I've certainly never worried much about all this stuff, and my SSDs still perform phenomenally well. I used one in my old Macbook well before OS X supported TRIM and all was well, although I have to admit that on another machine I thought for sure Linux was taking care of TRIM for me. Apparently not.

maus80 13y 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 13y 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-ubuntu-for-better-performance/ http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in-ubun...). It is fun to measure your IOPS before and after.

hansjorg 13y 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 http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim
- bad_user 13y ago
  That article is useless for dm-crypt encrypted volumes.
  - cpleppert 13y ago
    You have to disable TRIM on the encrypted filesystem with the discard option in crypttab and then set issue_discards to true in lvm.conf.

saboot 13y 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 13y ago
Trim gives out the block usage map. You may not want to do that on encrypted drives.
tombrossman 13y ago
Encrypted drives are problematic. I've found it easier to just run fstrim manually once in a while.

jberryman 13y 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 http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html

martey 13y 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 https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&rev2=75 https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&...

PeterWhittaker 13y 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 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....

lucb1e 13y 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.
- PeterWhittaker 13y 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.
- eropple 13y 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.
csense 13y 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?"

salient 13y 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).

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

nailk 13y ago

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

knappador 13y ago

# cat /etc/fstab ...defaults,noatime,discard,barrier=0,commit=600 Linux consumers...

shurcooL 13y ago

This reminded me to do the chore again. http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png

suprjami 13y 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".