On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 06:00:14PM -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: > I decided to explore using an ssd drive. I purchased a 40G Intel SSD > and so far it works well with SVN-20120514. > > I created a GPT partition table with a 10G partition using parted and > formatted as ext4. > > The performance seems to be good. htparm gives me about 230 GB/s which > is more than twice as fast as my usual drives that give about 105 GB/s. > > My question is how to best use the new drive in BLFS. I thought of /opt > and /usr. I don't think /home would be very good and of course I could > try to mount it as /mnt/lfs and use it as /. > > What would you try first? > > -- Bruce > If it was one of the cheap drives where the problems might be slowness once it has to free up a lot of deleted space, and perhaps a limit on how many times it can be updated before it fails, I'd be inclined to try is as a r/o / but loaded from a real disk once the system has all been built. But it's NOT one of those, and I believe Linus uses one as a normal disk.
So, where will you benefit from the speed ? In the old days /tmp could have been useful, but now /tmp is RAM backed. For me, untarring and rm -rf to remove built packages is one of the big delays. So, *I* might be tempted to use it at /scratch (for me that's where I put the "spare" space from my 500GB system disks - it isn't backed up, unlike my /home, and it's where I build kernels, do test builds of packages, and also where I will be doing media work (transcoding etc). I recall that your partition usage is very different from mine, but I think you need to look at the purpose of your partitions, not at where you happen to mount them. For me, /opt is for 'rubbish' that I don't normally want to run (e.g. cmake, llvm) but sometimes am forced to, but you use it for the current flavours of xorg and desktop environments. If you want a fast system, all the programs you normally run, and the configuration files they access, could be on the SSD. That would mean using partitions as / and /mnt/lfs. You could even back them up to the rotating disk "just in case". The problem with using it to measure package build times is that the file i/o from compiling will be a lot faster so you might get results that those of us on rotating drives can't achieve. Not necessarily a problem, and I'm fairly sure everyone will eventually move to SSDs if they live up to expectations, but in the meantime some of us might raise our eyebrows at your SBU times :-) Whatever you decide to do, I hope you enjoy it! Must go, got to see if my QT build has finished yet. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
