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Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive

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On 29.09.21 14:59, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> Earlier this year I purchased a nice Lenovo Carbon X1 with an NVME SSD
> with Win 10 Pro installed.  Ordinarily I would reformat the drive
> without a second thought but in this case I really do have occasional
> need to use Win 10 (Kenwood radio programming mostly) and since swapping
> the NVME is not trivial, I've opted to install Bullseye to a USB flash
> drive.
> 
> A test run with KDE Plasma shows that performance is acceptable even
> with EXT4 as the file system.  I now have some SanDisk Ultra Fit flash
> drives arriving in 128GB capacity (overkill, oh well).  I am now
> considering what file system would be proper to use in this case.  I
> understand that the journal can be disabled when using EXT4 to save
> writes which is probably fine (this system will be non-critical).  I've
> also seen that F2FS has been available in the kernel since 3.8, but I'm
> unsure whether the installer from a Debian live CD will offer it as a
> choice.
> 
> The Arch Wiki notes some issues with its fsck and the Debian Wiki is
> rather short on details.  I found this page[1] that was from 2013 and
> updated early last year.  The process is not trivial which hints that
> F2FS is not included in the Buster installer, at least.
> 
> As this is a non-typical installation for a dual-boot configuration that
> intends to use UEFI to choose the OS to run, are there tips and
> suggestions for this?  I have already solved the bug where MS places its
> boot image in a directory in the ESP that prevents an EFI enabled
> removable media from booting[2] (second paragraph).
> 
> TIA
> 
> - Nate
> 
> [1] https://howtos.davidsebek.com/debian-f2fs.html
> [2] https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Force_grub-efi_installation_to_the_removable_media_path
> 

I am running a (LVM LUKS encrypted) Debian on ext4 file system since 4 
years from an USB pen-drive and carry it around between various 
PCs/Laptops without problems concerning the USB hardware or file system 
or alike. The only problems have been the ones which you would the same 
also have had by using a not portable installation environment, the 
usual problems any Linux user might face from time to time, usually 
concerning configuration issues after having upgraded software. Local 
hard disk drivers are used by me only for storage of my MP3s at home, 
some other big software packages which I downloaded for installing them 
to the USB drive, huge amount of image data collected with my 
microscopes, and alike, but I do not use my HDDs anymore for the OS or 
usual home directory. My portable Debian USB pen-drive system up to now 
worked flawlessly.


What I suggest you to consider:
(1) Although never having had trouble myself, for being prepared for a 
USB hardware failure, which others are warning of, I "dd" the full 
USB-Stick every couple of weeks to some of the HDDs, and of course make 
(incremental, deduplicated) backups of the home directory at each 
shutdown, thus daily 1 to about 3 times. In the case of a USB pen-drive 
crash I could simply purchase a next device, move by "dd" the latest 
image to it, run "apt update && apt upgrade", and recover from the home 
directory backup all user data up to the latest state.

(2) Use only less than 95% of the volume of your USB storage hardware 
for the full system installation (all LVM / partitions / filesystems): 
128 GB from the one manufacturer do not equal 128 GB from the other 
manufacturer and if having to recover from the "dd" image, then you want 
to avoid that the new (still empty) 128 GB is too small for the old 128 
GB from the backup! The manufacturers claim there devices to provide 128 
GB, but it appears that these 128 GB are not equally available for you 
but kept by the device as maybe cache or maybe fall back memory for the 
case some memory position would start to fail. Actually I do not really 
know where the missing Gigs are, but I have had exactly this case when I 
thought to "dd" directly to a next stick, to clone my system as a backup 
instead of storing a "dd" image of it on a HDD. I to my surprise found 
that the newer, faster, even more expensive 128 GB hardware offered only 
124(?) GB. Therefor I reinstalled a volume reduced system or would have 
had to purchase 128 GB sticks until I would have found one big enough to 
again provide as much 128 GB storage as my original hardware has, in 
order to be able to rely on my backup strategy.

(3) In order to in general reduce unnecessary writes to the ext4 file 
system I for my usage scenario configured in  /etc/mtab
   /dev/mapper/lv_root / ext4 rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=600 0 0
   /dev/mapper/lv_home /home ext4 
rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=600 0 0
Note that it is configured noatime and commit.

(4) In the past I found extreme(!) I/O to be produced by Firefox, when 
it is writing its cache, and when it is writing its session restore 
information. These writes to my observation occur all the time, kind of 
nonstop! I could get it very satisfactorily reduced by applying a tool 
called "Profile Sync Daemon" (psd) from package "profile-sync-daemon". 
While it is packaged for Debian, as a starting point to study its 
documentation I suggest to better look it up in the Arch Linux Wiki.

Concerning (3) and (4), I call after saving very important data changes 
in a terminal window "sudo sync", hoping that this indeed writes 
everything immediately from caches to the disk although "commit" is 
specified in my mtab. (If someone would teach me if "sync" is indeed 
bypassing the "commit" configuration in /etc/mtab, then I would 
appreciate it!)


SUMMARY:
I never observed problems with ext4 on my since 4 years heavily used USB 
pen-drive.

Good Luck!
Marco

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"Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Nate Bargmann <n0nb@n0nb.us> - 2021-09-29 15:10 +0200
  Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Reco <recoverym4n@enotuniq.net> - 2021-09-29 16:50 +0200
    Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Nate Bargmann <n0nb@n0nb.us> - 2021-09-29 18:40 +0200
      Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2021-09-29 19:50 +0200
        Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Nate Bargmann <n0nb@n0nb.us> - 2021-09-30 02:00 +0200
    Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Nate Bargmann <n0nb@n0nb.us> - 2021-09-30 04:00 +0200
      Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Reco <recoverym4n@enotuniq.net> - 2021-09-30 09:10 +0200
      Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> - 2021-10-01 08:10 +0200
  Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2021-09-29 23:40 +0200
    Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Nate Bargmann <n0nb@n0nb.us> - 2021-09-30 02:10 +0200
  Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Marco Möller <talby@debianlists.mobilxpress.net> - 2021-09-30 22:20 +0200
    Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Nate Bargmann <n0nb@n0nb.us> - 2021-10-01 03:10 +0200
      Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive "Rick Thomas" <rick.thomas@pobox.com> - 2021-10-01 04:00 +0200
        Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive Marco Möller <talby@debianlists.mobilxpress.net> - 2021-10-01 18:20 +0200
    USB memory stick quality [was: "Proper" filesystem for Debian  installed on a flash drive] <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2021-10-01 08:50 +0200
      Re: USB memory stick quality [was: "Proper" filesystem for Debian  installed on a flash drive] Cindy Sue Causey <butterflybytes@gmail.com> - 2021-10-01 12:00 +0200
        Re: USB memory stick quality [was: "Proper" filesystem for Debian  installed on a flash drive] Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> - 2021-10-01 13:30 +0200
          Re: USB memory stick quality [was: "Proper" filesystem for Debian  installed on a flash drive] <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2021-10-01 13:50 +0200

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