If you have a Linux laptop or desktop with a solid-state drive, and happen to have disk encryption enabled through a LUKS/LVM combo, getting TRIM support enabled isn’t a very straightforward process. It has to be enabled on every IO layer.
In their blog post, How to properly activate TRIM for your SSD on Linux: fstrim, lvm and dm-crypt, Carlos Lopez gives a brief introduction on what TRIM is, and explains why it is beneficial to enable it. The article also describes the steps needed to enable this functionality on each IO layer (dm-crypt, LVM, and the filesystem).
I followed most of this guide for one my own systems, and while I followed
their advice and avoided enabling the discard flag on the filesystem, I never
set up a cron job for running the trim operation periodically. So I found
myself manually executing fstrim every now and then by hand.
This quickly became slightly repetitive, so I began looking into setting up the automation part. The guide above had an example setup using cron. However, I never set up a cron daemon on my system. So I wondered if it was possible to achieve the same result using systemd.
After reading some documentation on systemd unit files, I learned that is possible to setup timers for your service units, which effectively achieves the same result as a cron daemon.
Below I’m including a fstrim service and timer. The service mainly specifies
which command to run and the timer defines how often it should be executed.
Note that the service unit does not have a WantedBy option and its Type is
oneshot. This means it won’t be automatically executed, and that it is
intended to be a one off command, not a daemon. The timer does have a
WantedBy option, which will result on it being started at boot.
I can check the status of the timer by using systemctl list-times and also
run the operation on demands by starting the service unit:
systemctl start fstrim. The logs are stored on the journal, which can be
queried with journalctl -u fstrim.
/etc/systemd/system/fstrim.service
This is the service file. Here you can customize how fstrim is invoked. I use
the a and v options, which tell fstrim to automatically run on every
drive and print verbose output. Additionally, this assumes fstrim is
installed at /sbin/fstrim.
[Unit]
Description=Run fstrim on all drives
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/sbin/fstrim -av
User=root/etc/systemd/system/fstrim.timer
In this configuration, the fstrim command is executed by root 15 minutes
after booting the machine and weekly afterwards.
[Unit]
Description=Run fstrim on boot and weekly afterwards
[Timer]
OnBootSec=15min
OnUnitActiveSec=1w
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target