Trim/discard
Trim or discard is an operation on a storage device based on flash technology (SSD, NVMe or similar), a thin-provisioned device or could be emulated on top of other block device types. On real hardware, there’s a different lifetime span of the memory cells and the driver firmware usually tries to optimize for that. The trim operation issued by user provides hints about what data are unused and allow to reclaim the memory cells. On thin-provisioned or emulated this is could simply free the space.
There are three main uses of trim that BTRFS supports:
- synchronous
enabled by mounting filesystem with
-o discardor-o discard=sync, the trim is done right after the file extents get freed, this however could have severe performance hit and is not recommended as the ranges to be trimmed could be too fragmented- asynchronous
enabled by mounting filesystem with
-o discard=async, which is an improved version of the synchronous trim where the freed file extents are first tracked in memory and after a period or enough ranges accumulate the trim is started, expecting the ranges to be much larger and allowing to throttle the number of IO requests which does not interfere with the rest of the filesystem activity- manually by fstrim
the tool fstrim starts a trim operation on the whole filesystem, no mount options need to be specified, so it’s up to the filesystem to traverse the free space and start the trim, this is suitable for running it as periodic service
The trim is considered only a hint to the device, it could ignore it completely, start it only on ranges meeting some criteria, or decide not to do it because of other factors affecting the memory cells. The device itself could internally relocate the data, however this leads to unexpected performance drop. Running trim periodically could prevent that too.
When a filesystem is created by mkfs.btrfs(8) and is capable of trim, then it’s by default performed on all devices. Since kernel 6.2 the discard=async mount option is automatically enabled on devices that support that.