Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/7 Richard Toohey richardtoo...@paradise.net.nz On 7/11/2009, at 10:25 AM, Jean-Frangois SIMON wrote: It looks like the problem has nothing to do with SSD. Thanks for hints about this issue. I'll try to send the complete failure report within a few days, it end up as a kernel panic on first boot. Regards You are making an install that FAILS because the install media is CORRUPT. No surprise that the kernel panics - it has not been installed properly because the media is damaged. If you get exactly the same behaviour from a good install source, then (probably) worth reporting it. But the first suggestion will be to try -current, and that will lead you back to an installation/upgrade. HTH. I downloaded the image from ftp.fr.openbsd.org In the first install I have used a bad cd but I saw that and changed for a new one. The cd check was succesfull. And I tried to install from 3 different CD reader. I will try again to download the -current, check the media and install properly.
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/4 philippe aubry philippe.aub...@gmail.com: I'm using a 32 GB SSD drive from approximatly one year with openBSD 4.4 into a SOEKRIS and no troubles with that, the great think is NO NOISE, NO HEAT. I used the soekris as firewall and the uptime is approximatly 178 days. I've also been using a 32GB drive in a soekris for ~1 year. The box doesn't deviate much from the default install, so I thought it would be a great opportunity for a test run. The drive is made by Transcend with MLC chips, so it's pretty low end. Nevertheless, it has been running like a champ (or rather its maximum specs)! I even had squid on there for a few months while I was trying to kill the disk. -William
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/4 STeve Andre' and...@msu.edu On Wednesday 04 November 2009 16:10:06 Jean-Frangois SIMON wrote: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards I played with one, briefly, and it seemed to work. A litte weird, not hearing anything from it... But I'm not at all eager to actually use them just yet. Look for the goofs Intel has had with them. How long will they last, and what is the failure mode like? More often than not a spinning disk will give notice of impending death with a few bad spots before The End. But what of an SSD? By its very nature I could see an address line going, leaving a very weird pattern of unaffected data. SSDs are the future, I'm fairly sure but I think they need to mature as well as get bigger. Lastly, saying where the install hangs would really help. And of course how big is it and who made it? --STeve Andre' Hello, It will be a small SSD like 32 Go or 64 Go for my personal computer. It actually works for my home server however installing on my main computer fails during the installing process by going slower and slower then making IO errors. Regards
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 20:08:48 +0100 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/11/4 STeve Andre' and...@msu.edu On Wednesday 04 November 2009 16:10:06 Jean-Frangois SIMON wrote: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards I played with one, briefly, and it seemed to work. A litte weird, not hearing anything from it... But I'm not at all eager to actually use them just yet. Look for the goofs Intel has had with them. How long will they last, and what is the failure mode like? More often than not a spinning disk will give notice of impending death with a few bad spots before The End. But what of an SSD? By its very nature I could see an address line going, leaving a very weird pattern of unaffected data. SSDs are the future, I'm fairly sure but I think they need to mature as well as get bigger. Lastly, saying where the install hangs would really help. And of course how big is it and who made it? --STeve Andre' Hello, It will be a small SSD like 32 Go or 64 Go for my personal computer. It actually works for my home server however installing on my main computer fails during the installing process by going slower and slower then making IO errors. Regards Those errors are not printed to the screen? The SSD also inhibits printing of the dmesg? Sorry if i am mistaken and you don't want your issue resolved, but only rant. In that case you can disregard this mail. - Robert
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/4 K K kka...@gmail.com 2009/11/4 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards Sounds like an issue with your SSD? Can you supply a dmesg, and details on the SSD, make/model/supplier, as well as the motherboard and how the drive appears to the BIOS? On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Ted Unangst ted.unan...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/11/4 Roger Schreiter ro...@planinternet.de: it is like for any OS on SSD HD. Make sure, you are using no swap partition! This is ridiculous advice. This *was* reasonable advice for the older generations of CompactFlash, but may no longer be a consideration with newer flash/SSD drives. I have run many embedded servers (mostly OpenBSD on Soekris) without swap, never had any problems traceable to the lack of swap space. And if you are using an application, which is writing a lot of things into files, put the respective dirs into ramdisks! Combined with this is even dumber. If you can't swap, you're already in trouble if you run into memory pressure. So then you go and put the filesystem in RAM to make sure there's lots of extra memory pressure? Actually, the above is standard advice for running any Unix on flash, as people have been doing with Soekris and CF since at least 2001. The idea isn't to put the filesystem into RAM, but rather to reduce the write operations by mounting filesystems used for frequently written smal files (e.g. /var/tmp) as ramdisks. Kevin Model and make is not anymore available, it was LDLC (website ldlc.com). It must be very recent since they removed their products from the market. This is something possible that they do have has dome problems with it. The error actually appears wjile installing xfont46.tgz which is very very slow. It is normal speed util that particular file . errors : many atascsi_atapi_cmd_done, timeout one d0(ahci0:3:0): Check Condition (error 0x70) on opcode 0x28 SENSE KEY: Illegal Request The SSD appears in the bios as Veritech SSD 2009-03 Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4 F4 After quite a while, it finally finished the install process (passed the various errors) but the boot on SSD drive fails and crashes. Unfortunately, I am not used to extract from a machine that half works the dmesg and kernel crash informations (using serial interface). I have bought 2 cards (exactly identical) from the same supplier, and actually one of them work in production on mye server, and the one on my personal computer works fine with other operating systems (ex. Ubuntu). Regards
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/4 Aaron Mason simplersolut...@gmail.com 2009/11/5 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards Hi Jean-Francios, Is this a used SSD? That happens with used ones because they end up doing twice the work - once to erase the used block and again to actually write the block (and several blocks around them, AAMOF). If you have a secure erase option available, use it. This will restore the data blocks to an unused state, and restore full speed again. HTH Hi Aaron, I'm not sure I fully understood you, yes it has been used many times. Should I erase it completely in order to refresh properly the drive ? BTW I actually make regular save of the while drive because I'm afraid that it one days stops to works (the SSD on my server) and since it actually hosts a website, that's a good reason for me to tarball it once in a while, generally after many updates of the site. Regards Jean-Frangois
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/5 Robert rob...@openbsd.pap.st On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 20:08:48 +0100 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/11/4 STeve Andre' and...@msu.edu On Wednesday 04 November 2009 16:10:06 Jean-Frangois SIMON wrote: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards I played with one, briefly, and it seemed to work. A litte weird, not hearing anything from it... But I'm not at all eager to actually use them just yet. Look for the goofs Intel has had with them. How long will they last, and what is the failure mode like? More often than not a spinning disk will give notice of impending death with a few bad spots before The End. But what of an SSD? By its very nature I could see an address line going, leaving a very weird pattern of unaffected data. SSDs are the future, I'm fairly sure but I think they need to mature as well as get bigger. Lastly, saying where the install hangs would really help. And of course how big is it and who made it? --STeve Andre' Hello, It will be a small SSD like 32 Go or 64 Go for my personal computer. It actually works for my home server however installing on my main computer fails during the installing process by going slower and slower then making IO errors. Regards Those errors are not printed to the screen? The SSD also inhibits printing of the dmesg? Sorry if i am mistaken and you don't want your issue resolved, but only rant. In that case you can disregard this mail. - Robert I actually just posted them before (some ten minutes ago in the same thread). More cannot be done (like dmesg) at the moment because yes, it can be printed out on the screen, but i'm not used to the stuff that makes it out of a very minimalistic system such as a serial console, sorry for that. Regards
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 12:14:15PM -0500, Ted Unangst wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Joachim Schipper joac...@joachimschipper.nl wrote: This seems predicated on the firmware being smart enough to swap out bad sectors for good setors that are addressable but not used in practice. Is the firmware that smart? (I know about wear-levelling and swapping in reserve sectors, but that's different - those *cannot* be addressed.) There are no reserve sectors, there's just sectors. Some of them are reserved, but they're no different from the normal sectors. Think of it like a 6GB machine running PAE (and only one process). You can only address 4GB at maximum, but if something goes bad, there's other memory your virtual addresses can get mapped to. If you are only writing to 1GB of space though, it's easily spread out over all 6GB. The high 2GB is not special or different. I was going to send a you misunderstood my point message, but you are right about the no special sectors part, and I knew better. Thanks for the correction! Still, the point I was trying to make - that leaving part of your disk unpartitioned doesn't really help - stands, no? Joachim
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Joachim Schipper joac...@joachimschipper.nl wrote: Still, the point I was trying to make - that leaving part of your disk unpartitioned doesn't really help - stands, no? Depends. Partitioning or not partitioning is unlikely to make a difference, as it's writes that matter. However, if you need 32G of space, but buy a 128G disk, that will last longer. The 32G will almost certainly last long enough, but if you're paranoid, you can buy assurance by getting a larger disk. So leaving part of the disk unpartitioned implies you have extra space, which does help, but it's not the partitioning itself which makes the difference.
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 21:32:59 +0100 Joachim Schipper joac...@joachimschipper.nl wrote: On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 12:14:15PM -0500, Ted Unangst wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Joachim Schipper joac...@joachimschipper.nl wrote: This seems predicated on the firmware being smart enough to swap out bad sectors for good setors that are addressable but not used in practice. Is the firmware that smart? (I know about wear-levelling and swapping in reserve sectors, but that's different - those *cannot* be addressed.) There are no reserve sectors, there's just sectors. Some of them are reserved, but they're no different from the normal sectors. Think of it like a 6GB machine running PAE (and only one process). You can only address 4GB at maximum, but if something goes bad, there's other memory your virtual addresses can get mapped to. If you are only writing to 1GB of space though, it's easily spread out over all 6GB. The high 2GB is not special or different. I was going to send a you misunderstood my point message, but you are right about the no special sectors part, and I knew better. Thanks for the correction! Still, the point I was trying to make - that leaving part of your disk unpartitioned doesn't really help - stands, no? Joachim It makes no difference if the free space is kept free by not partioning it or simply not using all of the partitioned space. - Robert
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/6 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: 2009/11/4 Aaron Mason simplersolut...@gmail.com 2009/11/5 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards Hi Jean-Francios, Is this a used SSD? That happens with used ones because they end up doing twice the work - once to erase the used block and again to actually write the block (and several blocks around them, AAMOF). If you have a secure erase option available, use it. This will restore the data blocks to an unused state, and restore full speed again. HTH Hi Aaron, I'm not sure I fully understood you, yes it has been used many times. Should I erase it completely in order to refresh properly the drive ? BTW I actually make regular save of the while drive because I'm afraid that it one days stops to works (the SSD on my server) and since it actually hosts a website, that's a good reason for me to tarball it once in a while, generally after many updates of the site. Regards Jean-Frangois I assume you're talking about zero filling - I'm not sure that would have the desired effect since it wouldn't mark the sectors as unused. What I'm referring to actually erases the data in each sector and marks them as unused. AFAIK only Intel drives have this functionality, but a google will tell you if yours does or not - I'm sure other people have asked. For some clarity, this page might clear things up: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531p=8 HTH -- Aaron Mason - Programmer, open source addict - Oh, why does everything I whip leave me?
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
Ted Unangst wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Joachim Schipper joac...@joachimschipper.nl wrote: Still, the point I was trying to make - that leaving part of your disk unpartitioned doesn't really help - stands, no? Depends. Partitioning or not partitioning is unlikely to make a difference, as it's writes that matter. However, if you need 32G of space, but buy a 128G disk, that will last longer. The 32G will almost certainly last long enough, but if you're paranoid, you can buy assurance by getting a larger disk. So leaving part of the disk unpartitioned implies you have extra space, which does help, but it's not the partitioning itself which makes the difference. I agree with Ted and would like to expand on it: Partitioning the disk to extend its life only works after a secure erase of the drive and never ever touching the non-partitioned space. The reason for this is due to the SSD's internal mapping of logical OS-addressable sectors to its physical sectors. Take for example a fresh (newly bought or secure erased) 40G drive and put a 32G partition on it. For the SSD controller there will always be 8G worth of sectors that have never been touched and therefore can be used without wear-leveling its contents first. But if you even once use this partition and fill up the 8G, the mapping table will be filled up as well and even after deleting the content and/or the partition it will from this point on shuffle around these obsolete 8G of data. No type of formatting can free up these sectors other than secure erasing, which of course only applies to the whole drive. To be clear, something like a zero-format (dd if=/dev/zero) doesn't help as well, as the SSD controller would then shuffle around sectors with only 0x00 in it. So it takes self-control on your part to keep the SSD long-lived and fast. Maybe some better way would be to use the Host Protected Area feature. It limits the amount of OS-addressable sectors, thus the disk space always appears smaller to the OS than it really is and you can use the whole disk. In fact I suspect this is what Intel does with its X25-E SLC drives. The amount of sectors of the 32G drive is 62,500,000 which is an odd number since disks usually don't have such a nice looking number of sectors. Unfortunately the price point keeps me from verifying that. The X25-M consumer drives don't have a HPA-hidden space. I would therefore be thankful if someone with such a precious drive could check on that. I checked my X25-M with HDAT2 which boots into MS-DOS. For the sake of completeness: All of this applies only to SSDs without the TRIM ATA command. TRIM-enabled SSDs and OSs don't need this workaround.
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/5 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I've been using flash based SSD's in OpenBSD systems for 6 or 7 years, starting with small CF in firewalls and now SATA SSD's in desktops and laptops. Never had a problem installing to them and never had one go bad. I just use noatime, softdep and no swap (but I guess looking at the opinions of devs here, no swap is now just a bad habit). Shane
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
Quoting Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: [cut] The error actually appears wjile installing xfont46.tgz which is very very slow. It is normal speed util that particular file . errors : many atascsi_atapi_cmd_done, timeout one d0(ahci0:3:0): Check Condition (error 0x70) on opcode 0x28 SENSE KEY: Illegal Request Are you installing from CD - is the CD medium and the CD/DVD drive definitely good? It might be a dumb question, but is it DEFINITELY the SSD at fault here? Thanks.
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/6 richardtoo...@paradise.net.nz Quoting Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: [cut] The error actually appears wjile installing xfont46.tgz which is very very slow. It is normal speed util that particular file . errors : many atascsi_atapi_cmd_done, timeout one d0(ahci0:3:0): Check Condition (error 0x70) on opcode 0x28 SENSE KEY: Illegal Request Are you installing from CD - is the CD medium and the CD/DVD drive definitely good? It might be a dumb question, but is it DEFINITELY the SSD at fault here? Thanks. This is JUST what I was about to reply. Additionally, can you install onto some other disk on the same PC, (an HDD), to make sure it's not some other component? (Yes, I realize it sounds silly, but it's still something you ought to try). (Sorry Richard for sending this just to you the first time, instead of the misc@, my mistake)
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/5 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I've been using flash based SSD's in OpenBSD systems for 6 or 7 years, starting with small CF in firewalls and now SATA SSD's in desktops and laptops. Never had a problem installing to them and never had one go bad. I just use noatime, softdep and no swap (but I guess looking at the opinions of devs here, no swap is now just a bad habit). As a result of your luck, tomorrow you will be hit by a bus. Or so say the internet-surfing drama queens on our mailing lists.
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/6 richardtoo...@paradise.net.nz Quoting Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: [cut] The error actually appears wjile installing xfont46.tgz which is very very slow. It is normal speed util that particular file . errors : many atascsi_atapi_cmd_done, timeout one d0(ahci0:3:0): Check Condition (error 0x70) on opcode 0x28 SENSE KEY: Illegal Request Are you installing from CD - is the CD medium and the CD/DVD drive definitely good? It might be a dumb question, but is it DEFINITELY the SSD at fault here? Thanks. Hi, I tried booting on the CD from another device but it happened to do the same thing. There is no evidence that the SSD is the root cause but I assume because all other operating systems works fine on that machine, and the SSD is the only exotic thing in, also it just makes some errors on the disk while installing so I assume the disk is at fault. I will try to install on a standard drive see if there is any problem. Regards
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/6 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com 2009/11/6 richardtoo...@paradise.net.nz Quoting Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: [cut] The error actually appears while installing xfont46.tgz which is very very slow. It is normal speed util that particular file . errors : many atascsi_atapi_cmd_done, timeout one d0(ahci0:3:0): Check Condition (error 0x70) on opcode 0x28 SENSE KEY: Illegal Request Are you installing from CD - is the CD medium and the CD/DVD drive definitely good? It might be a dumb question, but is it DEFINITELY the SSD at fault here? Thanks. Hi, I tried booting on the CD from another device but it happened to do the same thing. There is no evidence that the SSD is the root cause but I assume because all other operating systems works fine on that machine, and the SSD is the only exotic thing in, also it just makes some errors on the disk while installing so I assume the disk is at fault. I will try to install on a standard drive see if there is any problem. Regards It appears to go the same way on a normal hard drive. I will try various things tonight. Reagrds
Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
On Wednesday 04 November 2009 16:10:06 Jean-Frangois SIMON wrote: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards I played with one, briefly, and it seemed to work. A litte weird, not hearing anything from it... But I'm not at all eager to actually use them just yet. Look for the goofs Intel has had with them. How long will they last, and what is the failure mode like? More often than not a spinning disk will give notice of impending death with a few bad spots before The End. But what of an SSD? By its very nature I could see an address line going, leaving a very weird pattern of unaffected data. SSDs are the future, I'm fairly sure but I think they need to mature as well as get bigger. Lastly, saying where the install hangs would really help. And of course how big is it and who made it? --STeve Andre'
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
Jean-Frangois SIMON schrieb: ... Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I Hello, it is like for any OS on SSD HD. Make sure, you are using no swap partition! And if you are using an application, which is writing a lot of things into files, put the respective dirs into ramdisks! We are running some embedded PCs with OpenBSD, which have the SSD HD completely write protected. All partitions are mounted read only, and /tmp, /dev and /var is put into ramdisks. Works fine. Regards, Roger.
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/4 Roger Schreiter ro...@planinternet.de: it is like for any OS on SSD HD. Make sure, you are using no swap partition! This is ridiculous advice. And if you are using an application, which is writing a lot of things into files, put the respective dirs into ramdisks! Combined with this is even dumber. If you can't swap, you're already in trouble if you run into memory pressure. So then you go and put the filesystem in RAM to make sure there's lots of extra memory pressure?
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Ted Unangst ted.unan...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/11/4 Roger Schreiter ro...@planinternet.de: it is like for any OS on SSD HD. Make sure, you are using no swap partition! This is ridiculous advice. And if you are using an application, which is writing a lot of things into files, put the respective dirs into ramdisks! Combined with this is even dumber. If you can't swap, you're already in trouble if you run into memory pressure. So then you go and put the filesystem in RAM to make sure there's lots of extra memory pressure? I'm with Ted on this one. At the very least, stick a USB drive in and use that for swap. If things are going to write to SSDs a lot, get two (if budget allows) and stripe/RAID-5 them - this actually does wonders for increasing the lifespan of SSDs. -- Aaron Mason - Programmer, open source addict - Oh, why does everything I whip leave me?
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
Hello, I'm using a 32 GB SSD drive from approximatly one year with openBSD 4.4 into a SOEKRIS and no troubles with that, the great think is NO NOISE, NO HEAT. I used the soekris as firewall and the uptime is approximatly 178 days. Regards 2009/11/4 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards
Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/5 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards Hi Jean-Francios, Is this a used SSD? That happens with used ones because they end up doing twice the work - once to erase the used block and again to actually write the block (and several blocks around them, AAMOF). If you have a secure erase option available, use it. This will restore the data blocks to an unused state, and restore full speed again. HTH 2009/11/5 STeve Andre' and...@msu.edu But I'm not at all eager to actually use them just yet. Look for the goofs Intel has had with them. How long will they last, and what is the failure mode like? More often than not a spinning disk will give notice of impending death with a few bad spots before The End. But what of an SSD? By its very nature I could see an address line going, leaving a very weird pattern of unaffected data. I'd say SMART would answer the call by sending DANGER WILL ROBINSON messages to the OS - it would be up to the OS to intercept these messages and inform the sysadmin, however. My $0.02. -- Aaron Mason - Programmer, open source addict - Oh, why does everything I whip leave me?
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
Ted Unangst schrieb: ... no swap partition! This is ridiculous advice. ... a lot of things into files, put the respective dirs into ramdisks! Combined with this is even dumber. Hi, anyway, intensive swapping onto SDD HD will destroy your SDD HD. If RAM is the limiting resource in your system, you are right, my advice is ridiculous. In any else case, my advice is important, and for many, many applications it is possible to equip a system with enough RAM, making swapping uneccessary. Ramdisks and complete write protections of the HD is of course just an option to think about, and depends on the application, if appropriate or not. Regards, Roger.
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:00:39 +0100 Roger Schreiter ro...@planinternet.de wrote: Jean-Frangois SIMON schrieb: ... Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I Hello, it is like for any OS on SSD HD. Make sure, you are using no swap partition! And if you are using an application, which is writing a lot of things into files, put the respective dirs into ramdisks! We are running some embedded PCs with OpenBSD, which have the SSD HD completely write protected. All partitions are mounted read only, and /tmp, /dev and /var is put into ramdisks. Works fine. Regards, Roger. That advice might have had some merit with 1GB Compact Flash drives ... On eg. a 80GB SSD partition 60 and leave the rest empty. With that you have _a lot_ of sectors to remap in case some fail. That will increase the lifetime of the drive. Usually flash fales gracefully, can't write but still read, so one would be able to recover the data. Flash is no mirical cure, having backups is still mandatory. I don't expect my 2,5 drive in my laptop to last longer than the stated 5 years the avarage MLC SSD gets quoted. All that banging around, even turned off, in the laptop bag takes it's toll. Harddrives that store critical data are swapped in the 2 to 3 year time frame at latest, if they didn't fail on their own before and are repurposed in less crucial systems like desktops. (...less potential downtime, less power consumption, more peace of mind) On the gp's topic, there is nothing special about SSD's that should keep them from working like any other (guessing) SATA device. (It doesn't work! Isn't anywhere near a cry for help that warrants an answer...) - Robert
Re: Installing OpenBSD on SSD drives
2009/11/4 Jean-Frangois SIMON jfsimon1...@gmail.com: Hello, Is there any particular problem with installing OpenBSD on a SSD HD ? I once could on one machine but on my actual machine it simply does'nt work. After a while, the SSD disk becomes like overloaded and unavailable to continue the installing process of 4.6. Regards Sounds like an issue with your SSD? Can you supply a dmesg, and details on the SSD, make/model/supplier, as well as the motherboard and how the drive appears to the BIOS? On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Ted Unangst ted.unan...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/11/4 Roger Schreiter ro...@planinternet.de: it is like for any OS on SSD HD. Make sure, you are using no swap partition! This is ridiculous advice. This *was* reasonable advice for the older generations of CompactFlash, but may no longer be a consideration with newer flash/SSD drives. I have run many embedded servers (mostly OpenBSD on Soekris) without swap, never had any problems traceable to the lack of swap space. And if you are using an application, which is writing a lot of things into files, put the respective dirs into ramdisks! Combined with this is even dumber. If you can't swap, you're already in trouble if you run into memory pressure. So then you go and put the filesystem in RAM to make sure there's lots of extra memory pressure? Actually, the above is standard advice for running any Unix on flash, as people have been doing with Soekris and CF since at least 2001. The idea isn't to put the filesystem into RAM, but rather to reduce the write operations by mounting filesystems used for frequently written smal files (e.g. /var/tmp) as ramdisks. Kevin
