Considerations and hints on SSD + 4GB of RAM laptop combo

[GalaticStryder]

Hello, everyone.

I've been following some threads about SSDs and how to optimize them but none of those threads show consistency, some people say you'd create a trim script and run every day, others say once a week and others even recommend to disable the trim because the SSD has an internal trim method...

I'm a little bit confused since I've seen some posts talking about SSD writes and how to reduce them, on Gentoo handbook I've come across answers to use squashfs or tmpfs on portage and then set the amount of memory for it. Having 4GB RAM on my 5th. gen i3 I don't know the right amount of RAM to dedicate to compiling the software or if it should be done on my setup.

My basic plan is:

/boot on FAT32 (256mb)
/ on EXT4 (The rest of the SSD)

I don't know if swap is good for my setup or not, so it's another point to get an advice. Also, I've chosen to use EXT4 for the sake of stability and to avoid Kernel complexity on FS.

I'd like to use the Gentoo systemd with gnome 3 shard by the way as I've done previously on my PC, I thought I'd mention that since this installation is the biggest one.

Any other tips or tricks are appreciated. If I'm resurrecting a similar topic, please point me and we can remove this topic.

Thanks.

[eccerr0r]

On modern decent quality SSDs, except for sector alignment issues and enabling TRIM on filesystems that support it - Treat them like a normal hard drive! DON'T WORRY ABOUT WEAR OUT! Go ahead and swap to it, emerge to it, let the kernel TRIM when it thinks a sector can be reclaimed.

You can setup tmpfs as needed for portage if you want even more speed, but not necessary for longevity. The SSD will become obsolete or full before it wears out.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[Roman_Gruber]

WAtch out that you algin the disc accordingly.

I have one SANDISK SSD which has mayor issues. Purchased a few weeks ago, and I moved my installtion on that new SANDISK drive. With my next backup i will cycle through my 3 SSDs. I think the SANDISK brand is just garbage. Has the worst read write performance in comparission with cheap ADATA SSD and several year old plextor SSD. BAD FIRMWare or bad alginment or both. I see it during bootup the effect.

my gentoo installation without dist files needs ~25GB with a few files in my home directory.
MY distfiles are on a 1TB ordinary hdd. in my second bay on my notebook

I have build most of my software in RAM on my older box with 4GB of ram. it should be still possible when you disable tmpfs for libreoffice and a few other packages.

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GEneric Hint. When you install a box focus on how you will backup your data and how often

[GalaticStryder]

I've made some progress on my laptop. Replaced the wifi/bt chip and installed the SSD.

My way to get into installing Gentoo was using the system rescue CD burned into a USB stick. The minimal install doesn't work on my laptop - probably due to the stupid Insyde BIOS that supports only AHCI/UEFI and there's no option to use legacy to boot the minimal disc.

The problem I'm facing now is on the bootloader setup, I'd like to use the same setup as on my previous Arch Linux install using EFI stub Kernel to boot up. As the Handbook dictates, I need to use efibootmgr to create the entry.
This is how I've done it:

- http://i.imgur.com/uYOb3yhh.png

The initramfs was created using genkernel with lvm support, everything is under lvm but /boot and /boot/efi that are on regular /sda2 and /sda1 respectively.

The problem is that the entry I created that is supposed to boot doesn't appear on my BIOS boot selection and even worst, it resets the boot order every time.

I tried pointing the bootx64.efi manually but it wouldn't work due to missing initramfs and command line arguments.

Anyone know how to force those BIOS'es to actually boot the efibootmgr entry that I created? I think it's not possible to fix it though and I may need to use a bootloader for this setup...

[DONAHUE]

IMO https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel is short and accurate. Tells how to embed an initramfs in the kernel. If a kernel with an embedded initramfs is on the EFI system partition (ESP) at EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi no boot manager is needed, that is the UEFI default boot loader location.
Do note that https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel and the Gentoo handbook have differences, particularly when specifying a mount point for the ESP: handbook at /boot; https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel at /mnt/EFI.
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Defund the FCC.

[GalaticStryder]