Reduce write to SD cards
Bug #1587453 reported by
Viktor Petersson
This bug affects 1 person
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Snappy |
Won't Fix
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
As discussed with Manik, Didier (and others) we need to ensure that the writes are kept to a minimal to SD cards.
Manik mentioned that there is already code in place for this that could in theory be lifted from the Snappy phone.
With Raspberry Pis deployed in production, this is a critical issue. If there are not serious measures for reducing writes, the SD cards will be worn out in a matter of months (at best).
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i am not sure what you mean with "Snappy phone" there has been no attempt yet to use phones on snappy and there will likely not be any until the phone base has properly moved to 16.04 first (which is probably still half a year away or so, phones still massively depend on upstart while snappy has systemd as hard requirement, this is a lot of work)
i highly doubt you will be able to wear out a modern SD with the current snappy base install within several years, there are no processes that do any massive write operations (perhaps beyond some syslog logging that you could disable), we do not use any swapping or any other write intensive operations by default in snappy images ...
to my knowledge there is no specific technology on phones to prevent excessive writes beyond a careful selection of packages and defaults (which applies in the same way to snappy images)
i personally havent managed to wear out a single SD since i started working on snappy two years ago, not even the cards i use for deaily re-flashing and testing, is there any evidence that this happens ?
the only way i could imagine to wear out an SD on a snappy install currently would be an application or service snap that does constant excessive write operations for persistent data it needs. for this use-case there wont be any solution though if the data really needs to be persistent.