Dan Weinreb’s blog

Solid-state disks (SSDs) are getting less expensive, faster, and larger.  I just bought a lightweight laptop with 128GB of SSD instead of a disk. Just to see what I’d find out, I poked around on the web looking for information how to use SSD’s under Linux.  Keep in mind that I am not an expert on SSD’s, nor on Linux!  Bearing that in mind, here’s what I found:

Tuning Linux for SSDs

Here a quick summary of Tom Bryer’s “Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives” (Sept 2008)

If you’re using Linux with SSD’s, it is recommended to use the noatime option to turn off writing the “last accessed time” attribute to files.  This avoids writes, increasing the lifetime of the SSD.  (As root, edit /etc/fstab and change “relatime” to “noatime” on SSD partitions.  This might only apply to ext3.)

You can create a tmpfs partition (in RAM) and make Firefox use it for its cache, to reduce disk writes.  Edit the file /etc/fstab and add:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

Then, in Firefox, open about:config, right click in an open area, create a new string value called:

browser.cache.disk.parent_directory

and set it to /tmp.

If you write a large file to the disk, Linux will stop any other application’s attempts to write, potentially for a long time.  To greatly reduce the pause, change the I/O scheduler for SSD’s. Do:

cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

to get the current scheduler for a disk (sda, in this case) and to see the alternative options. You’ll probably have four options, the one in brackets is currently being used by the disk specified in the previous command:

noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]

Now do (as root):

echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

File Systems for SSDs

What’s a good Linux file system to use for SSD’s?  A lot of people have asked this on the web and gotten very few straight answers.  There is jffs2 but everybody seems to think it’s lousy.  Some people think that ext2 is considered better than ext3, which is a journaling file system that does more writes.  However, journaling keeps the file systems’ metadata consistent after a crash, so it’s quite valuable. Surely there’s a lot more to say that this, but I wasn’t able to find it.

SanDisk has announced ExtremeFFS.  It looks like this is not a Linux file system, but rather the hardware acts like a disk.  If so, one could take advantage of this technology from non-Linux machines.

Samsung says that ExtremeFFS  uses a non-blocking architecture in which all of the NAND channels of the SSD can behave independently.  It can read and write at the same time.  They also claim that it can speed up random writes by 100x!   How they do it  is explained in this article by Chris Mellor.  They avoid the need for erases in a lot of cases.  Also there is a garbage collector!

I found a comment saying that “this sounds like what Fusion-io is doing on the ioDrive.”  Fusion-io makes very high-speed SSD’s.

Also

Although one person points out that your SSD may outlive your laptop, or you can replace it with a larger, cheaper, faster one that will be around at that time (assuming that you can get your data off before it’s too late).  But avoiding journaling is also good for speed, not just longevity.

It’s good to align your file system on an erase-block boundary.  Especially if you’re using RAID, so that a whole stripe can be copied efficiently.  You want your partition aligned on a 128K boundary.  Theodore Tso’s blog item provides vast technical detail.

Please share what you’ve found out about these things.  Thanks!

The Kindle 2 has finally come out. There’s an article here about it,
by Wade Roush, one of the best tech reporters in the business.

In January, I did a blog entry about the original Kindle, which I am quite fond of.  I was just reading from it last night.

Here’s what I personally think about it, although if you use your differently from the way I use mine, you could have different feelings:

The internal memory expansion doesn’t really matter that much to me. The
first Kindle has plenty of space for books, which are very small, and
you can add a big SD card. If you use audio a lot it might help; I
don’t do that.

Thinner and lighter is nice, but the original Kindle is really fine in that regard.

More shades of gray is nice; not a huge deal but nice. I wish that
in books that had maps and diagrams, they’d include more of those in
the Kindle editions.

Just 20% faster is not a major qualitative change. The original Kindle is quite fast enough for me already.

Making the keys smaller is very clearly right, and I would
appreciate that a lot; I think this is the most important improvement. It’s hard to pick up an original Kindle without
hitting one of those buttons. I use a cool leather case (TuffLuv) that
can hold the Kindle up like a picture frame. My wife has one for hers
and uses this all the time.

Text-to-speech is a good idea. It would be very useful on long car drives.

Syncing across multiple Kindles could be useful, since we’re a 2-Kindle family, although we usually read different books.

The battery lasting 25% longer is nice, but the existing battery lasts a very long time already.

I’m glad to see that Amazon is continuing to improve this excellent product.

Registration for the International Lisp Conference, 2009, is now open.

The conference will be from Sunday, March 22 through Wednesday, March 25, at the Stata Center, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

It features:

• Gerald Sussman, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and David Moon as invited speakers
• Five tutorials (no extra charge)
• Fifteen technical papers
• Seven demonstrations
• Lightning talks (you can give you own; first-come, first-served)
• An all-star panel on the future of Lisp
• The Great Macro Debate
• Birds of a feather sessions, and other informal discussions
• Banquet at the Hyatt-Regency, with special entertainment (no extra charge)

Come meet the top Lisp experts and practitioners in the world. Learn how to get the most out of Lisp. Find about about the latest developments from research and industry. The conference is a rare opportunity for face-to-face interaction, sharing knowledge and ideas with the experts of the worldwide Lisp community. Students are especially welcome. Everyone will have a great time!

Here’s where to find all the information.

Sponsored by:

• ITA Software, Inc.
• Franz Inc.
• LispWorks Limited
• Clozure, Inc.
• Ravenbrook Limited