Installing F16 to SSD, (re)formatting parameter issues

[AzertyNL]

Hi,

I'm having trouble to install F16 to an SSD. My main goal is to have the ext4 filesystem for the / partition to be created with some specific parameters that (should) help to align filesystem specific structures better to the erase block sizes of my SSD.

My first attempt was to partition the SSD myself and create an ext4 filesystem as intended for the / filesystem: (It's the -E parameter that's supposed to be important if /dev/sda2 is properly aligned in the partitioning too)

mkfs.ext4 -v -b 4096 -m 2 -E stride=128,stripe-width=128,resize=70G /dev/sda2

after doing this...

when I go through the livecd "installation to harddisk" procedure, I can not get F16 to install to this partition, it insists that it want to re-format the partition I chose (/dev/sda2) to use as /

When i give in and let the installation tool reformat (to ext4) the partition I can not find any option to add my (-E) parameters to the issued mkfs command that is run.

Is there a way to install to a preformatted filesystem, or a way to add parameters to the mkfs that is done from the installation tool GUI?

[george_toolan]

This is not a RAID array!

Just use fdisk to create a partition and it will automagically be aligned on MB borders. The first partition should start on sector 2048. You can check this with

fdisk -l /dev/sda

That's all you have to do ;-)

[AzertyNL]

Originally Posted by george_toolan

This is not a RAID array!

That's all you have to do ;-)

Indeed it is not a RAID array. But that does not mean the RAID related parameters do not serve a valid purpose. I wanted to duplicate the advice from Ted Ts'o:

Once you do this, we’re almost done. The last thing to do is to create the file system. As it turns out, if you are using ext4, there is a way to tell the file system that it should try to align files so they match up with the RAID stripe width. (These techniques can be used for RAID disks as well). If your SSD has an 128k erase block size, and you are creating the file system with the default 4k block size, you just have to specify a strip width when you create the file system, like so:

# mke2fs -t ext4 -E stripe-width=32,resize=500G /dev/ssd/root

This is what I ment in my topic start post with help to align filesystem specific structures better to the erase block sizes of my SSD

You'll find his entire text at http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/...se-block-size/ which appears down, but an archived copy is available at http://web.archive.org/web/201012242...se-block-size/

So I'm still hoping to find out if there is a way to install to a preformatted filesystem, or a way to add parameters to the mkfs command that is called from the installation tool GUI?

[george_toolan]

This article is three years old now!

Please read his follow-up article where he talks about the ata trim feature and especially his #2 comment about fdisk ;-)

fdisk is automagically aligning partitions now