LXer: This week at LWN: The trouble with discard
 

Published at LXer:

Traditionally, storage devices have managed the blocks of data given to them without being concerned about how the system used those blocks. Increasingly, though, there is value in making more information available to storage devices; in particular, there can be advantages to telling the device when specific blocks no longer contain data of interest to the host system. The "discard" concept was added to the kernel one year ago to communicate this information to storage devices. One year later, it seems that the original discard idea will not survive contact with real hardware - especially solid-state storage devices.

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