Gentoo on SSD. Any tricks I should know of?

erikderzweite · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Feb 2006 Posts: 143

I am planning to install Gentoo on a Verbatim 16Gb ExpressCard SSD.
The drive will be used solely to increase boot process and startup time of programs, i.e. / will be on SSD, while swap, /home, /var, /usr/games, /usr/portage and /usr/local/portage (because of layman overlays) stay on HDD and /tmp will be on tmpfs.
After doing some research, I came to the conclusion that ext4 without journal will be the FS that suits my needs best.

I still have a question about drive partitions. Obviously, the SSD will be a single-partitioned drive. Are there any tricks I should apply while partitioning -- I don't really need cylinders and blocks on SSD, was thinking about GPT (as I don't dual-boot and grub seems to understand GPT).
Can anyone give me some advice on that? Any other SSD tricks you know of?

Dagger · Retired Dev Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 765 Location: UK

Hi,

Personally on my SSD I try to minimise writes to drive by:

1) mount /tmp as tmpfs
2) mount /vat/tmp/portage as tmpfs
3) mount /usr/portage from server over nfs (if you have hdd - leave it there)
4) point distdir to tmpfs
_________________
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
Join the FSF as an Associate Member!
Post under CC license.

albright · Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 5:35 pm Post subject:

I think IO disk scheduler should be noop
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

erikderzweite · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Feb 2006 Posts: 143

Thanks for the noop tip, albright.

Daggen, have you made any custom partitioning on your SSD to optimize reads/writes etc., so that the partitions will be aligned to 128KiB boundaries?
What should I do if I intend to use the disk as a whole? Would it be wise to format e.g. /dev/sdb instead of creating partitions there?

Dagger · Retired Dev Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 765 Location: UK

erikderzweite · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Feb 2006 Posts: 143

didn't matter, actually, because I only have one partition on that SSD.

Well, it works reasonably well (for a driver that's in staging) -- boot time has improved to about 30 seconds from previous 1:10. And there is room for improvement, 'cause the phison driver is a bit buggy and takes about 8 seconds to start. App boot times have improved as well.