Out-of-the-Box, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS To Support TRIM On SSDs 133
First time accepted submitter Maurits van der Schee writes "Where in older versions you had to add a cron job calling "fstrim" or mounting with the "discard" option in fstab, the new LTS (Long Term Stable) version of Ubuntu Linux will automatically enable TRIM for your SSD. Good news for hardware enthusiasts!"
Taking too long (Score:5, Insightful)
This is way overdue.
It's also taking too long for file systems that provide snapshot features to become mainstream and default as well. And no, LVM snapshots aren't good enough.
No, I'm not going to write the patches. They wouldn't be accepted in any case. Fundamental features such as the IO stack and file systems are now the exclusive purview of well-heeled outfits like Red Hat, Oracle, Intel, OSDL, etc. and and their stable of full time developers.
They just need to do their jobs and get it done.
TRIM? who needs it! (Score:4, Insightful)
How to get away from random writes you ask? Simple! Just use BTRFS.
"But my database!" you say. Well, the answer is simple - time to move away from 50 year old technology and to a modern database engine, the kind that doesn't do random writes either (fractal tree based, for example).
Disclaimer: All of the above is not written for stodgy "enterprise level" types.
Re: "Good news for hardware enthusiasts!"... (Score:5, Insightful)
...or typesetters & typists, accountants, video editors, music composers, engineers & architects, etc. In fact, anyone who produces, rather than consumes will tend to use computers as their main system. SSDs work nicely for all of them, if only to store the OS and program files.
That you only know gamers and developers says more about the company you keep rather than what technology is used out there. It is true that tablets and smart phone sales are on the rise and PC sales are declining, but that doesn't mean that people have stopped using their old computers.
Re:TRIM not always good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:TRIM not always good (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, youre overstating the threat.
If the drive is encrypted, theres no more or less threat from brute-forcing.
From a plausible deniability standpoint, Im not terribly sure how helpful that is ANYWAYS. If someone wants to know if youre using truecrypt, they could, I dont know, look at the MBR and see whether its using the Truecrypt bootloader. The idea that you can say "What partition?" when goons grab your mysteriously unreadable laptop is laughable. Im sure there are super corner cases where that would be helpful, but generally if youre being held by the sorts of people who have the means and ability to do rubber hose cryptography, theyre not going to put up with your BS about "but wait look i gave you a password that boots to an Ubuntu partition which only accounts for 1/2 of the drive's size, and has no data worth encrypting whatsoever!"
Being involved with multiple organizations which employ encryption for very different reasons, none of them use plausible deniability / hidden encryptions; Id reckon because its not terribly helpful, or even plausible.
Re:Defeats pleasure of unnecessary labour (Score:0, Insightful)
I strongly disagree. I found my first week with Linux, and subsequent weeks prodding it to make it work like I wanted it to was all about learning how Linux worked, and not much about computers. For example, I needed to learn how to edit the xorg.conf file so I could implement the side buttons on my Logitech mouse at the time (so you can browse back/foward in web sites and file managers without having to move the mouse). In Windows it was bloody easy - it WORKED, even without any special Logitech drivers. In Linux the side buttons didn't do shit until I configured xorg.conf to understand what kind of mouse I had.
That episode was a good introduction to the problems that occur when going off the beaten track and trying to be "special" (i.e. use Linux on the desktop instead of a incredibly widely supported system like Windows). It's better nowadays - much better in fact. But learning about computers through Linux? Hell no.