Re: [PATCH 1/2] fs: Do not dispatch FITRIM through separate super_operation

Markus Trippelsdorf
2010-11-18T19:33:00Z

On 2010.11.18 at 18:05 +0000, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Jeff Moyer wrote:
> > James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@suse.de> writes:
> >
> > > Not stepping into the debate: I'm happy to see punch go to the mapping
> > > data and FITRIM pick it up later.
> > >
> > > However, I think it's time to question whether we actually still want to
> > > allow online discard at all. Most of the benchmarks show it to be a net
> >
> > Define online discard, please.
> >
> > > lose to almost everything (either SSD or Thinly Provisioned arrays), so
> > > it's become an "enable this to degrade performance" option with no
> > > upside.
> >
> > Some SSDs very much require TRIMming to perform well as they age. If
> > you're suggesting that we move from doing discards in journal commits to
> > a batched discard, like the one Lukas implemented, then I think that's
> > fine. If we need to reintroduce the finer-grained discards due to some
> > hardware changes in the future, we can always do that.
>
> "Growable" virtual disks benefit from it too, if it frees up a lot of space.
>
> Windows has some ability to trim unused space in NTFS on virtual disks
> for this reason; I'm not sure if it's an online or offline procedure.
>
> Online trim may be slow, but offline would be awfully inconvenient
> when an fs is big and needed for a live system, or when it's your root fs.

You can call FITRIM from a running system. Infact I run it once per week
as a cron job on my (mounted) root fs.

--
Markus