Ubuntu Aims To TRIM SSDs By Default

During the first day of the latest virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical developers plotted out the enabling of TRIM/DISCARD support by default for solid-state drives on Ubuntu.

For those not familiar with SSD TRIM, there's the Wikipedia article. The Linux kernel has had support for ATA TRIM since the 2.6.33 kernel and support has also arrived for major Linux file-systems like Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS for handling TRIM requests. Supporting TRIM requires setting the discard mount option for using TRIM when deleting files as it's not enabled by default.

Likely for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Canonical is wanting to enable SSD TRIM by default to improve the solid-state drive performance. This Ubuntu change would be on both the desktop version of Ubuntu Linux and for mobile devices running Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu developers aren't looking to enable discard at the file-system level since it can slow down delete operations, so instead they're wanting to have a new cron job that routinely runs fstrim for TRIMing the system.

This new cron job for Ubuntu Linux will check for mounted file-systems not using the file-system level discard option, ensure that it's an SSD being used that supports TRIM, and then call on fstrim. For the phone version of Ubuntu they are discussing though just adding the discard flag for file-system mounting.

More details on the automatic SSD trimming for Ubuntu can be found from this vUDS page and the Google Hangout video below.