Nvme optimization settings (zram, ram log)

[Biasio95]

Hi, I just switched from an ancient ubuntu-rockchip install to armbian ubuntu 26.04 with the mainline kernel.

I did a bit of an unorthodox installation, I wanted to install on an nvme drive, and instead of using a microSD and then copying the system with armbian-install, since I didn't have a working microsd available I did a "manual" installation, I flashed rkspi_loader.img into the SPI taken from the armbian image and then flashed the armbian img directly to the nvme drive with an usb adapter from my PC.

 

All is good and working fine, but I'm wondering if I'm missing any settings that gets applied during the armbian-install process (are there any?) that are specific for nvme.

And regarding Zram, ram2log and other optimizations that armbian uses for SDs, how should I configure them?

 

My setup is a Radxa Rock 5B with 8GB of RAM with a Samsung 970 evo plus, should I disable zram and create a swapfile? Any other setting to look out for?

I think my hdparm -t speed is a bit low, around 1300 MB/s.

 

Thanks in advance

[eselarm]

As far as my experience is, there is no difference in final result if you do manual 'install' like you did. It runs the usual (user) setup scripts. It is even the same when you start an image as container, done that many times for various platforms. In fact writing SPI-flash is non-automatic, is manual as can be quite invasive. With modern ARM64 SBC like ROCK5B also people might threat it like a PC, with difference that PC comes with a motherboard that has already firmware/bootloader/UEFI/BIOS written by the manufacturer. Although some motherbaords also can use open source, like coreboot I think, but guessing.

 

What to do as further tuning and customization depends on what you want to do with the ROCK5B. There is 1.5 decades between the single core ARMv6 based RaspberryPi1 and the current high-end SBC's that are 100x faster and can be treated like an Intel/AMD PC. I actually have no NVME for x86-64 (is still SATA SSD although also M.2 slot as well), but use my 500GB Samsung 970 EVO+ in the ROCK5B. I use Btrfs and compress-force=zstd for almost all Linux rootfs, so always create an extra swap partition, although a swapfile also works nowadays with special create options. I rather not use the (currently very expensive) RAM for swap when 4-lane PCIE v3 NVME is there. But that is also because my ROCK5B acts as a server, containers and KVM etc and also I use the RAM and NVME for caching a large HDD. So in terms of wear of flash storage, that caching is just way more demanding than what happens on a decade old SD-card only SBC. But NVME/SATA SSD's have perfectly readable stats and many good brands can write more TeraBytes than the specs mention from manufacturer. SD-cards can be very poorly design internally, and have no stats. So you simply don't know when they will break.

 

If the SBC only does some simple things like camera streaming or some sensor's on GPIO pins, it makes sense to keep as much as possible in RAM. So then just keep it like it is. Or even disable journal to non-volatile storage if never any issues and only enable if troubles. One problem I had with zram swap is that on a 256MiB NanoPi-NEO, it failed when media streaming under memory pressure. mp3 or opus or h264 etc don't compress and can still buffer a lot, so the OOM killer started acting. I was not able to change the whole media stuff so stopped zram swap and put swap on normal extra swap partition. 

[Biasio95]

Thanks for the reply @eselarm. I was wondering if the install script was doing more than just flashing the SPI and cloning the partition, but if that's all it does I'm good.

 

Regarding Zram and ramlog, I'm not concerned about how much the Nvme SSD gets written, I mainly use the Rock 5B as a low power NAS for temporary files, it downloads a ton of stuff that get shared on the other devices on my LAN, and after a while the files get deleted, so the work load is already more intense than what a bit of swapping and logging is going to do.

 

But I sometimes use it to host simple game servers for my friends, so from time to time I need all the possible RAM, would disabling ZRAM and ramlog be beneficial, considering the SSD is fast enough to act as an efficient swap?

[eselarm]

You disable the zram swap, I forgot how, I think look in /etc/default/ambian* files. Else disable or mask the specific .service file.