[oe] OE and SSDs

[Sander van Grieken]

On Thursday, February 13, 2014 18:00 CET, Philip Balister <philip at balister.org> wrote: 
> On 02/13/2014 05:38 AM, Carlos Rafael Giani wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > we are considering purchasing SSDs for our development machines, for
> > faster I/O and better latency. One open question is whether to buy TLC-
> > or MLC-based drives. TLCs are considerably cheaper. They would not be
> > used in build bots, but on the other hand, people will build entire
> > images with OE by themselves during development.
> > 
> > So I wonder about the impact on the drive's lifespan, and whether or not
> > it is severe enough to warrant the more expensive MLC drives (up to 2
> > times more expensive).
> > 
> > Did anybody made experiences with these? Any recommendations?
> 
> A lot of people use as much ram as they can fit in the box and use
> tmpfs'. You might try that approach first.

It might be interesting to in some way integrate this behaviour automatically, if an FS-on-SSD is detected and plenty of RAM is present. For instance, if INHERIT+="rm_work" is set, the build directory could be automatically overlayed using aufs/unionfs, since the intermediate result in the build directory is then by definition irrelevant after a succesful build.

I have no idea though, what the minimum amount of free memory would need to be to be sure that none of the bigger builds fail. 

Regards,
Sander