
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS supports TRIM on SSD drives - maus80
http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2013/12/ubuntu-14-04-lts-supports-trim-ssd-drives/
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wfunction
Instead of being happy, I'm rather horrified to learn that this hasn't been
supported until now.

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mkl
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".

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

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Joyfield
You just want to blame someone other than yourself for not knowing stuff,
right?

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nnq
Ubuntu is a customer/"average joe" oriented OS, Canonical spends money to
actively promote it as such (!), therefore it should be fit for this purpose.

I know this kind of stuff, but the average user isn't required to know this.
Even if the product is free, having a default setting that shortens hardware
lifespan instead of an automatic configuration for best lifespan/performance
is to me simply _cheating the customer._ You may wave in may face the "no
guarantee to be fit for a particular purpose" or whatever is written in the
license, but when you are a commercial company that actively promotes a
product, you are responsible to make it "just work", "by default" and to "not
require me to think."

...and generally thinking, I think that we as software developers should take
the "don't make me think" philosophy more seriously and ditch the "RTFM"
mindset, even if we write libraries or tools that are to be used by other
programmers. "RTFM" simply _can 't work at scale:_ when you use tens or
hundreds of devices, apps and technologies, you just don't have the physical
time to "read the manual" for all of them, so you should just be able to
assume "sane / mostly optimal" defaults. And no, not even a large company
can't just hire one professional that is expert in each particular technology
they use, open-source or not: nobody can afford this, most shit should just
work by default, and when we'll have technology that will be able to "read our
minds" or "know stuff for us" we should actively demand that is does so.

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phaer
> [...] is to me simply cheating the customer.

You become a _customer_ , when you start paying them. Until then you are just
a user. The license which most of the packages included in Ubuntu use says:
"BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE
PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE
STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES", so what did you
expect?

~~~
wfunction
> You become a customer, when you start paying them. Until then you are just a
> user.

^ The problem with free software: you're not supposed to expect it to work
correctly.

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vidarh
^ The problem with randomly downloading stuff from the internet without
reading the instructions: you likely won't know how to operate it correctly.

~~~
wfunction
You just _have_ to say something even if it doesn't make sense don't you?

TRIM isn't mentioned in what you call "the instructions" [1].

[1]
[https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation)

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cookiecaper
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
> 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?

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shocks
Here is a great guide: [http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-
windows-7-install-o...](http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-
windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds)

:)

~~~
wfunction
Looks 99% BS to me, and the other 1% seems to be unnecessary.

Would you mind listing the items you think are actually necessary here,
instead of pointing me to a 489-page forum thread?

~~~
jodrellblank
From near the top of the opening post:

 _A quick word on SSDs: SSDs do NOT require the confusing and intense setup
that a lot of people seem to suggest. The current day SSDs are much more
reliable and literally all that is necessary is to change the SATA mode to
AHCI or RAID in the BIOS /UEFI, install, and you are good to go. _

~~~
justin66
Even the move to AHCI isn't strictly necessary with most drives.

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

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PeterWhittaker
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
> 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
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.

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

~~~
hansjorg
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
That article is useless for dm-crypt encrypted volumes.

~~~
cpleppert
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.

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

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

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

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maus80
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.

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jberryman
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
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&...](https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&rev2=75)

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salient
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).

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saboot
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.

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

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suprjami
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".

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

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shurcooL
This reminded me to do the chore again.

[http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png](http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png)

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knappador
# cat /etc/fstab

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

Linux consumers...

