FSTRIM

 

NAME

fstrim – discard unused blocks on a mounted filesystem  

SYNOPSIS

fstrim [-a] [-o offset] [-l length] [-m minimum-size] [-v] mountpoint

 

DESCRIPTION

fstrim is used on a mounted filesystem to discard (or "trim") blocks which are not in use by the filesystem. This is useful for solid-state drives (SSDs) and thinly-provisioned storage.

By default, fstrim will discard all unused blocks in the filesystem. Options may be used to modify this behavior based on range or size, as explained below.

The mountpoint argument is the pathname of the directory where the filesystem is mounted.

Running fstrim frequently, or even using mount -o discard, might negatively affect the lifetime of poor-quality SSD devices. For most desktop and server systems the sufficient trimming frequency is once a week. Note that not all devices support a queued trim, so each trim command incurs a performance penalty on whatever else might be trying to use the disk at the time.

 

OPTIONS

The offset, length, and minimum-size arguments may be followed by the multiplicative suffixes KiB (=1024), MiB (=1024*1024), and so on for GiB, TiB, PiB, EiB, ZiB and YiB (the "iB" is optional, e.g., "K" has the same meaning as "KiB") or the suffixes KB (=1000), MB (=1000*1000), and so on for GB, TB, PB, EB, ZB and YB.

-a, –all

Trim all mounted filesystems on devices that support the discard operation. The other supplied options, like –offset, –length and –minimum, are applied to all these devices. Errors from filesystems that do not support the discard operation are silently ignored.

-o, –offset offset

Byte offset in the filesystem from which to begin searching for free blocks to discard. The default value is zero, starting at the beginning of the filesystem.

-l, –length length

The number of bytes (after the starting point) to search for free blocks to discard. If the specified value extends past the end of the filesystem, fstrim will stop at the filesystem size boundary. The default value extends to the end of the filesystem.

-m, –minimum minimum-size

Minimum contiguous free range to discard, in bytes. (This value is internally rounded up to a multiple of the filesystem block size). Free ranges smaller than this will be ignored. By increasing this value, the fstrim operation will complete more quickly for filesystems with badly fragmented freespace, although not all blocks will be discarded. Default value is zero, discard every free block.

-v, –verbose

Verbose execution. With this option fstrim will output the number of bytes passed from the filesystem down the block stack to the device for potential discard. This number is a maximum discard amount from the storage device’s perspective, because FITRIM ioctl called repeated will keep sending the same sectors for discard repeatedly.

fstrim will report the same potential discard bytes each time, but only sectors which had been written to between the discards would actually be discarded by the storage device. Further, the kernel block layer reserves the right to adjust the discard ranges to fit raid stripe geometry, non-trim capable devices in a LVM setup, etc. These reductions would not be reflected in fstrim_range.len (the –length option).

-V, –version

Display version information and exit.

-h, –help

Display help text and exit.

 

RETURN CODES

0

success

1

failure

32

all failed

64

some filesystem discards have succeeded, some failed

The command fstrim –all returns 0 (all succeeded), 32 (all failed) or 64 (some failed, some succeeded).

 

AUTHOR

Lukas Czerner <[email protected]>
Karel Zak <[email protected]>

 

AVAILABILITY

The fstrim command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.