Running FreeBSD on M.2 SSD

[Daniel Kalchev]

FreeBSD does not technically have driver for different disks. People asked whether it is an NVMe device or SATA device, because those interfaces have different drivers.

But for FreeBSD, an mechanical SATA, hybrid SATA or SSD SATA will use exactly the same SATA driver. It depends on the chipset.

It is possible however, that the timing between the drive and the SATA controller might be different and that is causing the problem.

Did you experiment with different settings of the SATA controller in BIOS?

If the problem is related to the size of journal, that might mean for some reason the SSD is slow. About th eonly thing an SSD might be slow for is TRIM. Therefore, TRIM might be your problem if weirdly implemented in that drive … so you might try to disable it and see if the problem goes away. As it’s not a server, I doubt you will notice much of performance drop.

You can disable TRIM for ZFS with

sysctl vfs.zfs.trim.enabled=0

You can put it in /boot/loader.conf. Do this before writing any data to the pool or even creating the pool.

Speaking of that, the output of 

sysctl kstat.zfs.misc.zio_trim

might tell us something.

I would advise doing all such tests with ZFS, because it will spot any flaky hardware/setup easily.

Daniel

> On 25 Feb 2020, at 15:28, Mario Olofo <mario.olofo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Good morning all,
> 
> @Pete French, you have trim activated on your SSDs right? I heard that if
> its not activated, the SSD disc can stop working very quickly.
> @Daniel Kalchev, I used UFS2 with SU+J as suggested on the forums for me,
> and in this case the filesystem didn't "corrupted", it justs kernel panic
> from time to time so I gave up.
> I think that the problem was related to the size of the journal, that
> become full when I put so many files at once on the system, or was
> deadlocks in the version of the OS that I was using.
> @Alexander Leidinger I have the original HDD 1TB Hybrid that came with the
> notebook will try to reinstall FreeBSD on it to see if it works correctly.
> 
> Besides my notebook been a 2019 model Dell G3 with no customizations other
> than the m.2 SSD, I never trust that the system is 100%, so I'll try all
> possibilities.
> 1- The BIOS received an update last month but I'll look if there's
> something newer.
> 2- Reinstall the FreeBSD on the Hybrid HDD, but if the problem is the
> FreeBSD driver, it'll work correctly on that HD.
> 3- Will try with other RAM. This I really don't think that is the problem
> because is a brand new notebook, but... who knows =).
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Mario
>