Few months ago I installed Fedora 19 on my new laptop with Samsung SSD and yesterday I found out TRIM is not enabled by default. I was installing using standard options with LVM/LUKS/ext4 partitions.

There were some problems in Fedora 18 with LUKS not propagating TRIM commands, but this was fixed in Fedora 19. On my system, TRIM commands propagate successfully. One just needs to make few changes in the configuration. First of all, we need to check if TRIM propagates for all partitions to the end device:

[lzap@lzapx ~]$ lsblk -D
NAME                                            DISC-ALN DISC-GRAN DISC-MAX DISC-ZERO
sda                                                    0      512B       2G         1
├─sda1                                                 0      512B       2G         1
└─sda2                                                 0      512B       2G         1
  ├─fedora_lzapx-root                                  0      512B       2G         1
  ├─fedora_lzapx-swap                                  0      512B       2G         1
  └─fedora_lzapx-home                                  0      512B       2G         1
    └─luks-aaaaaaaa-6657-44f4-8297-bbbbbbbb1111        0      512B       2G         0

The last column shows if TRIM commands do propagate. We can see all is set, except the encrypted home (the last line). To get full TRIM support on LUKS-encrypted devices, we need to allow TRIM commands. Note that this can decrease encryption strengh. This is the Fedora 19 default crypttab file:

$ cat /etc/crypttab
luks-aaaaaaaa-6657-44f4-8297-bbbbbbbb1111 UUID=aaaaaaaa-6657-44f4-8297-a571e02e5492 none

I added discard (used to be allow-discards in older versions of Fedora - updated) option there:

$ cat /etc/crypttab
luks-aaaaaaaa-6657-44f4-8297-bbbbbbbb1111 UUID=aaaaaaaa-6657-44f4-8297-a571e02e5492 none discard

After reboot, LUKS can be checked (for discards flag) with:

[lzap@lzapx ~]$ sudo cryptsetup status luks-aaaaaaaa-6657-44f4-8297-bbbbbbbb1111
/dev/mapper/luks-aaaaaaaa-6657-44f4-8297-bbbbbbbb1111 is active and is in use.
  type:    LUKS1
  cipher:  aes-xts-plain64
  keysize: 512 bits
  device:  /dev/mapper/fedora_lzapx-home
  offset:  4096 sectors
  size:    370683904 sectors
  mode:    read/write
  flags:   discards

Note the lsblk command will still show zero for the LUKS partition (this is normal). You should have the whole chain with 1 and cryptsetup status should give you discards.

Before we get to the actual configuration, there are two optional steps you can do.

Optional LVM configuration

If you modify your LVM logical volumes often (e.g. shrinking, deleting), you want to set issue_discards to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf. Then you need to do the next optional step described bellow.

Optional init RAM disk regeneration

If you have root partition encrypted by LUKS (not my case) or if you have your root partition on LVM and you want LVM trimming when shrinking or deleting (see above optional step), initial RAM disk needs to be regenerated using the following command:

dracut -f

You will need to reboot to make this change effective of course.

Now, to enable TRIM and take advantage of it, there are two options:

TRIM when deleting files

It is possible to configure ext4 to send TRIM commands while deleting data. You can do this by adding discard option to partitions in /etc/fstab. Note that this slows down deleting a bit. It depends on the SSD drive, but this can slow down quite significantly on some drives.

Do not put discard option to swap devices as this is not required (and perhaps it will not work either). Swap is SSD friendly by default and propagates TRIM command.

TRIM via systemd service

Preferred option for those who do not want to play around with anything and want to discard later (when computer is at idle). To enable this option, do this:

systemctl enable fstrim.timer
systemctl start fstrim.timer

This timer was not enabled on my system by default, but I am upgrading my Fedora twice an year and I can’t tell if this is the same for new installations.

TRIM from cron

This is my preferred option because it can be scheduled daily, weekly or during night if you do not turn off your laptop/server:

cat /etc/cron.weekly/01-fstrim
#!/bin/sh
fstrim /
fstrim /home

chmod +x /etc/cron.weekly/01-fstrim

Try to run the script now, it should not print any error message. If you changed LUKS configuration, you might need restart before doing that. If you delete lots of files often, consider scheduling trimming every day or even every hour. The more you trim, the faster the process should be.

That’s all folks. I would like to thank Lukáš Czerner, Kamil Páral and Chris Smart for helping me with this.