Hi folks, I’ve been watching Haiku develop for a few years now and feel like I’m ready to try it out. I’m planning on installing to an Acer netbook that I’m not using much these days to get a feel for Haiku. The netbook uses an SSD, so I was wondering- is there any configuration/setup I need to do inside Haiku once I install? For example, in Windows I would do things like verify that TRIM is enabled, disable system restore, disable drive indexing, disable defrag, disable page file, disable hibernation, disable prefetch and superfetch, etc. Do I need to do anything like this in Haiku?
Thanks for the help; looking forward to trying Haiku!
Trim has to be done manually at this point (run “fstrim” from terminal). As to the others… I have not done them on any of my machines. You certainly can disable the pagefile (Preferences->Virtual Memory), but indexing is pretty integral to the fs and I don’t think you can turn it off. I don’t know of a defrag utility or even if it is necessary with BFS so probably nothing to worry about there. (If you want to do a “scandisk” like operation, you need to boot from a USB drive and run checkfs).
Just a word of warning, trim support still may be buggy, see ticket #10336. Personally, I haven’t dared using it yet…
I created my partitions big enough so they’ll never be used up (hopefully) and keep additional partitions to be able to migrate my data around if I have to.
You can use checkfs on mounted partitions, so booting from an USB stick isn’t really necessary. I recommend to use it with the -c parameter first, however, as that will only report and not try to fix the file system. You may be able to salvage parts of currupted files, if you’re lucky…
As always: keep uptodate backups of your data!
I have virtual memory disabled, mostly because 16gb RAM is more than plenty for the apps currently available for Haiku.
FWIW, you can also keep the virtual memory swapfile on a separate partition, more or less like in Linux. Just make sure to mount that partition from UserBootScript. Different Haiku installations can then use the same swapfile.
But no, I have Haiku installed on an old Dell 2120 on a SSD alongside Bodhi Linux and Freedos, and it just installed. No special steps necessary. Once in a while, open a terminal and run checkfs /boot, but you should do that on a HD as well.
It is important to remember that SSDs work best if data is transferred in 4K blocks.
8K, 16K, 32K and 64K blocks work too but Haiku at present only supports 4K and 8K when you create partition. I hope the new Haiku in the future will support the larger block sizes.
But one big problem at present if Haiku wants to create it’s first partition at a 2K boundary, which means every 4K block transfer becomes two data reads and two data write internally to the SSD, vs writing 4K on a 4K boundary becomes a single data write inside the SSD.
Sorry, mistake from the last post. Haiku wants to start it’s partitions offset by 512 bytes from the ideal positions.
Since I usually create multi-OS boot drives I tend to format using Windows 7, which creates partitions at 1 MB boundaries. Which works find with Haiku so is my most common way of creating disks from scratch,
