Intel NVMe drive filesystems should be created with 'nodiscard'

Bug #1869069 reported by Nish Aravamudan
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
curtin
Fix Released
Medium
Ryan Harper

Bug Description

Per public documentation at: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/ssdc/data-center-ssds/Intel_Linux_NVMe_Guide_330602-002.pdf (page 6):

Filesystem Recommendations
IMPORTANT: Do not discard blocks in filesystem usage.
Be sure to turn off the discard option when making your Linux filesystem. You want to allow the SSD manage
blocks and its activity between the NVM (non-volatile memory) and host with more advanced and consistent
approaches in the SSD Controller.
Core Filesystems:
• ext4 – the default extended option is not to discard blocks at filesystem make time, retain this, and do not
add the “discard” extended option as some information will tell you to do.
• xfs – with mkfs.xfs, add the –K option so that you do not discard blocks.

However, in the current curtin filesystem configuration, it is not possible to specify the 'nodiscard' option at creation time. Instead a workaround must be used to create the filesystems in early_commands, and then to preserve the existing filesystem.

Ideally, 'nodiscard' becomes an option (semantically) to the filesystem creation logic and implies the two changes mentioned above for ext4 and xfs. That would allow operators to avoid very lengthy filesystem creation times on Intel NVMe (86 minutes v. 9 minutes with SSD).

Related branches

Ryan Harper (raharper)
Changed in curtin:
importance: Undecided → Medium
status: New → In Progress
Chad Smith (chad.smith)
Changed in curtin:
assignee: nobody → Ryan Harper (raharper)
Revision history for this message
Server Team CI bot (server-team-bot) wrote :

This bug is fixed with commit 8a2fbf0c to curtin on branch master.
To view that commit see the following URL:
https://git.launchpad.net/curtin/commit/?id=8a2fbf0c

Changed in curtin:
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Ryan Harper (raharper) wrote : Fixed in curtin version 20.1.

This bug is believed to be fixed in curtin in version 20.1. If this is still a problem for you, please make a comment and set the state back to New

Thank you.

Changed in curtin:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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