On 11/01/2024 09:54, Tomoaki AOKI wrote:
On Thu, 11 Jan 2024 08:36:24 +0100 Alexander Leidinger <alexan...@leidinger.net> wrote:
[..]
There's one possibility which nobody talked about yet... changing the default to noatime at install time in fstab / zfs set. I fully agree to not violate POLA by changing the default to noatime in any FS. I always set noatime everywhere on systems I take care about, no exceptions (any user visible mail is handled via maildir/IMAP, not mbox). I haven't made up my mind if it would be a good idea to change bsdinstall to set noatime (after asking the user about it, and later maybe offer the possibility to use relatime in case it gets implemented). I think it is at least worthwile to discuss this possibility (including what the default setting of bsdinstall should be for this option).
[..]
A different aspect of view. Nowadays, storages are quickly moving from HDD, aka spinning rust, to SSD. And SSD has a risk of sudden-death of wearing out. In ancient days, HDD dies not suddenly and at least some cases admins could have time to replace suspicious drives. But SSD dies basically suddenly. IMHO, this could be a valid reason to violate POLA. In limited use cases, atime is useful, at the cost of amplified write accesses. But in most cases, it doesn't have positive functionality nowadays. Anyway, we should have time to discuss whether it should be done or not until upcoming stable/15 branch. stable/14 is already here and it wouldn't be a good thing to MFC. Only *.0-RELEASE should be the point to introduce this, unlike discussion about vi and ee on forums.
The default values change over time as the needs of people, programs and hardware change. Many values for sysctls changed over time. If "noatime" can help people to not trash SSD / SD storage, I can imagine that bsdinstall will detect the storage type (simple guess can be made by diskinfo -v) and offer a "noatime" option that the user can check/uncheck. This option can be pre-selected for flash based storage. I don't care defaults for my-self, I can change them, but sane defaults should be beneficial for new users without much background knowledge.
Kind regards Miroslav Lachman
