Ubuntu 14.04 LTS supports TRIM on SSD drives | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS supports TRIM on SSD drives

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98 pointsmaus8076 comments

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

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".

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

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/

I run it on all my Macs. :)

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

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.

> [...] 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?

> 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.

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

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

Who cares?

The design still sucks, that's what matters.

Oh, well this sandwich you made me might have glass shards in it, but you gave it to me for free, so why should I complain?

The "average joe" is not buying SSDs.

AJ: My computer is slow, what should I do? Computer Guy: Buy an SSD, I'll also mount it for you! ...err, you have Linux?! Let's see if if works... Yes it does, you're clear to go! (usually the "computer guy" anywhere but actually competent, and whatever he knows is all about Windows...)

...software, especially vital things like OSs should be "designed for reality" and unfortunately this also means to be "designed for stupidity, ignorance and thoughtlessness".

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.

> 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?

Ahh the old "I'm a pissed off customer because you should have read my mind" routine.

Realizing customers want TRIM to be enabled doesn't exactly require you to be psychic, but I'll play along with the hyperbole and point you to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right

Except that:

(1) you're not the customer until you pay money and since I assume you haven't paid them for support, which is available btw, you can't be the customer.

(2) trim on Linux was known to cause problems with certain SSDs, not to mention for encrypted volumes (with dm-crypt, which is now offered as a painless option in Ubuntu's GUI installer) it's a security risk. For this reason, I really hope Canonical does know what they are doing, because such features are always problematic if you don't really know the hardware it will run on top of.

(3) no, the customer is not always right and as proof of that fact, pick any 2 customers and marvel at their different opinions on the same topic. Obviously, trying to please everybody cannot work, ergo there is no such thing as "the customer" if by that you refer to yourself and your own opinions and that phrase is just bullshit used in marketing campaigns, as there is no company on this earth that actually believes it.

Using encrypted volumes on SSD's is already a security risk without TRIM, because of the sort of information SSD firmware might store about about how blocks were written. One important piece of information would be about blocks' ages, because it's in the interest of SSD firmware to identify data which is not being frequently modified.

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949574

2) Well that horrifies me even more

3) "there is no company on this earth that actually believes it" well I'm glad you've checked every company

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.

> 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.

If you have not paid them for support, and whine because you can't be bothered to read up on the product, why exactly do you think they'd consider that a loss?

Perhaps because it ultimately means a smaller install base, which can make Ubuntu less attractive for developers and enterprises, as fewer users are already familiar with it.

And then, this article is hooking me with title…

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 :)

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.

>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).

> 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?

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

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?

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.

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

Yeah I saw, it made me wonder why @shocks linked me to it...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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....

> 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.

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.

I'd call unity more tweakable in that you can get rid of it entirely and replace it with something else. When I was on Ubuntu, I used XMonad, configured to my liking, and no desktop environment. It was great, and better than my experience is today on OSX.

If you know how to, practically any linux distro is much more tweakable than OSX is. Definitely needs a lot more tweaking though, I'll grant that.

Also note that there are people who put linux on their mac book pros, which is something I'm thinking of doing myself.

OSX is hardly tweakable at all in comparison - what tweakability are you referring to?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

Interesting, complete opposite for me, was on OSX for a few years, a dream compared to previous Windoze experience.

But, I grew tired of Finder, of spinning beach balls, eye candy, manually resizing windows, and generally mouse clicking around what more and more seemed to me like a McMac than the world's greatest OS.

What kills it for me on Linux are the tiling WMs. Try Awesome or i3, absurdly good user experience (using the latter here), particularly in a multi-head setup. Have about 15 terminals open here on one monitor, snapped into a quadrant grid with each panel consisting of a few sub tabs. No mouse needed, no manual resizing nonsense, no cluster fuck of randomly layered windows to sort through.

Throw in an expose-style docker for Skype, Rhythmbox, Gnote, etc. floatable apps and you're golden.

Love me some Linux, only point of OSX is to fire up a VM and see how my web apps look on the iThings in Xcode hardware simulator ;-)

There are a lot of addon applications that make window management much more palatable in os x. Even if you don't use all the whizbang consumer features in os x there is still a lot there as a result of the continual iteration and a complete focus on the desktop user. I don't think Linux and Windows have had anything like that kind of focus at all. The applications for os x also seem to be much higher quality than those for linux and windows. I honestly couldn't go back to windows or linux at this point even if I wanted to go back to a tiling window manager.

> 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.

Let's not get carried away here. When they work, it's nice, bit sometimes I have to do the gesture twice to get it to work (on a last rev MacBook Pro). I still find myself using the Ctrl + Left / Ctrl + Right key combos more than the gestures.

I've also noticed my "Spaces" getting randomly swapped (e.g. Desktop 2 & Desktop 3 swap places) without any (to me) rhyme or reason.

For the last issue, have you tried System Preferences → Mission Control → uncheck "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use"?

Did your previous notebook had an SSD drive?

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.

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

That article is useless for dm-crypt encrypted volumes.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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&...

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).

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.

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

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

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".

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

This reminded me to do the chore again.

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

# cat /etc/fstab

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

Linux consumers...

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