SSD

This article describes how to set up SSDs (Solid State Drives) on Gentoo Linux. It presumes the user has obtained knowledge of setting up, partitioning, and formatting mechanical hard drives.

Rootfs
The  option on a rootfs mount should not be used. discard is the "TRIM" command that tells the SSD to do its magic. Having discard running constantly could potentially cause performance degradation on older SSDs. Modern SSDs use discard by default. Rather the following command can be used manually or be setup as a cron job (see below) to run twice a day, which should suffice for the rootfs:

Mount point
If you're going to have a low write directory mounted on SSD, using the "discard" option will be fine in. See below. If you're going to mount a database to an SSD, you probably want timed TRIM commands rather than the discard option.

Partitioning
The fdisk utility (, version 2.24.1-r2 and up) can be used for GPT disk partitioning.

Use type fdisk /dev/sda to run fdisk, use option for help. The following is an example for GPT partition table with BIOS motherboard. Type + to create a new empty GPT partition table on the SSD. Type +,, , +, +, + to create BIOS boot partition.

Next create a 2GB swap partition:

Finally create system root partition and write the changes:

Although fdisk is a tool familiar to many Linux users, other common partitioning tools exist: gdisk, gparted, and parted. All of them (newer versions) handle partition alignment automatically. When in doubt whether partition is aligned, check that each partition starts on a MiB boundary (multiple of 2048 sectors). This should be 'safe' for any device (SSD or not).

LVM
LVM aligns to MiB boundaries and allows discards by default. No special configuration is required.

In order to TRIM all unused space in the VG use the blkdiscard</tt> utility:

Alternatively, there is a discard option in which makes LVM discard entire LV on lvremove, lvreduce, pvmove and other actions that free physical extents (PE) in a VG. However, enabling it will immediately render the system unable to undo any changes to the LV layout.

LUKS
When root-device exists on LUKS, set the following kernel option:

Although this depends on the Initramfs implementation. In any case, for TRIM to work on encrypted LUKS devices, they have to be opened with the  option.

Formatting
If you can find your erase block size, you can add some extended attributes that may help performance. For software raid, you really should know the erase block size. Consider this information when making your purchase. Regardless of whether you're using RAID or not, setting extended values is known to be beneficial. https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_setup#ext2.2C_ext3.2C_and_ext4

http://blog.nuclex-games.com/2009/12/aligning-an-ssd-on-linux/

The modern FAQ found on the Arch wiki too:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD

Without knowing the erase block size

 * 1) Formatting the rootfs partition /dev/sda3:
 * 2) Using 4096 byte blocks by default aligns the SSD for writes (see [defaults] section of /etc/mke2fs.conf and also
 * 3) man mkfs.ext4 about "-b block-size" and "-T usage-type[,...]" inside it):

With knowing the erase block size | this info can be outdated

 * 1) Formatting the rootfs partition /dev/sda3:
 * 2) Using 4096 byte blocks aligns the SSD for writes;
 * 3) Using ERASE_BLOCK_SIZE / 4 as the stride and stripe width size;
 * 4) In this example, OCZ Vertex drives have 512 kibbibyte -
 * 5) Erase Block size, therefore stride/stripe-width = 512/4 = 128:

blkdiscard</tt>
If you are formatting a previously used device and your preferred mkfs</tt> does not support bulk discards when creating the filesystem, you can use blkdiscard</tt> (from or later) before creating the filesystem.

Mounting
Given the considerations above, either add something similar to this:

Or:

If you choose the latter, see the cron section below you don't want to manually TRIM the drive.

Once you've set up you can run the following command to have the drive mounted:

In the same way you can add discard option to the swap line in fstab too. The following example shows you how SSD disk swap can be parallelized with SATA disk swap:

Once you've set up swap in fstab you can run the following command to make swap available:

cron
Run fstrim -v /</tt> from cron twice a day to automatically do "discard":

#Mins Hours  Days   Months  Day of the week   command 15    1,13   *      *       *                 /sbin/fstrim -v /

There is also a semi-automatic cronjob available on GitHub called SSDcronTRIM which has the following features:


 * Distribution Independent script (developed on my Gentoo system).
 * The script decides every time depending on the disk usage how often (monthly, weekly, daily, hourly) each partition has to be trimmed.
 * Recognizes if it should install itself into /etc/cron.{monthly,weekly,daily,hourly}, or any other defined directory and if it should make an entry into crontab.
 * Checks if the kernel meets the requirements, the filesystem is able to and if the SSD supports trimming.
 * Simply install it by running it once without any option and uninstall it with the  option

Future version should implement:


 * Use of nice</tt> and ionice</tt> to let trimm only run when the disc is not busy.
 * Overgive options to fstrim (e.g. '-m 1M')
 * support for encrypted filesystem (LUKS)

fstrimDaemon
If your computer turned off when cron scheduled its job, fstrim would not be called at all. You can install fstrimDaemon to solve this problem.

tmpfs
When using an SSD, administrators generally want to reduce the amount of writes performed. On Gentoo, Portage is a huge source of writes, and putting these writes into system memory rather than a disk is beneficial. If you have more than 8GB of ram you may want to consider using tmpfs, which is a way to dedicate some system memory to storage on a temporary basis. It is generally advised to not use more than half of the available system memory for tmpfs.

For the next example, presume the system has 12GB of memory and the user would like to allow up to 6GBs for tmpfs. Edit and add:

After the fstab entry is set, tell Portage to use the above location to compile temporary space. This is done in :

XDG cache
When running Gentoo on desktop, many programs, using X windows systems (Chromium, Firefox, Skype, etc.) are making frequent disk I/O every few seconds to cache. Default cache directory is, which is on hard drive.

Edit and add line:

Do not forget to run env-update</tt>:

Warning: With above change, auto unlocking the gnome keyring didn't work anymore. /var/log/messages said the following:

May 5 10:02:52 localhost gnome-keyring-daemon[5561]: couldn't bind to control socket: /home/david/.cache/keyring-hRt5QC/control: No such file or directory