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fstrim

I have a number of slightly differently configured Raspberry Pi systems. On most of them, when I type "fstrim -v /" I get something like this:

fstrim -v / /: 122716160 bytes were trimmed

This command tells the SD card which blocks have been written to but are no longer used, so that it can erase them for future use. I normally put this command in /etc/rc.local and/or a weekly cron job.

Yesterday I got a new Pi, loaded it with 2013-09-25-wheezy-raspbian.img and on this one I get:

fstrim -v / fstrim: /: FITRIM ioctl failed: Operation not supported

I looked around an saw references to the kernel not supporting it, problems with encrypted filesystems, volume manager etc. But this Pi has neither of them, and I have others that are running Raspbian as well with the same latest kernel.

What can be the reason for this? Can it be related to the particular SD card in use? (it is a Transcend 16GB)

Reply to
Rob
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Is it using a file system that doesn't support fstrim?

Reply to
Rob Morley

No. It is a plain download of the Raspbian image. It uses ext4 as always.

Reply to
Rob

This is a Debian bug. Turns out the Debian kernel package managers are idiots and didn't build the ext4 module with FITRIM support. It's not fixed in Sid either, I'm running it on my laptop and just tested fstrim. I wouldn't worry about it either way, sheer unreliability will kill most SD cards long before fstrim would start extending the life of the media.

Reply to
Jonathan

It must be recently introduced then? I have several Raspberries running and none of them show this problem. However, this is the first one that I installed myself from a Raspbian image I downloaded.

Reply to
Rob

I?m skeptical about that explanation, since: (i) the ext4 FITRIM implementation is not conditional (ii) the error code corresponds to the underlying block device lacking discard support (unimplemented ioctls yield EINVAL) (iii) it works perfectly well when I try it on a device that does support ATA TRIM (iv) Ben?s really not an idiot

Perhaps you?d care to quote the bug number.

--
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/
Reply to
Richard Kettlewell

I wonder if that's it. Were all SD cards accessed through the native Pi SD slot? The SD card protocol does support explicit erase operations and it appears the Linux MMC driver does use that for TRIM.

Questions: are we talking the same card here? Some cards handle erase in nonstandard ways which might not be supported. And were any used in a USB reader? Many USB readers don't support erases (I'm not sure if the USB Mass Storage standard implements them - SCSI does, but I think it's a recent addition).

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

The card is in the standard slot of a Pi. It is a Transcend SDHC 16GB class-10 card.

I have another one of those cards, I will see if that has the same problem. Did others see this problem with that card?

I'm certain that the similarly labeled 4GB card does not have this problem.

Reply to
Rob

So it turns out I'm an idiot and I was attempting to run fstrim on rotational storage. Never mind.

Reply to
Jonathan

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