The truth about firmware 1.4 and Linux

[bigup]

Hello all,

This post is for people using Linux that would like to upgrade their firmware to the last 1.4 version. We will try to answer questions, with the help of the OCZ community. Personally I have a Firmware version 1.10

[bigup@bigup-laptop BiGuPBox]\$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
ATA device, with non-removable media
        Model Number:       OCZ-VERTEX v1.10                        
        Serial Number:      LCRH13ZYFG7AX12EJ898                    
        Firmware Revision:  1370

I saw on some posts, people saying that Linux users should use firmware 1.41 with GC (Garbage Collection) because Linux does not provide TRIM support.
This is true Linux does not supports TRIM, for example Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic does not support it. Here is the evidence.

TRIM is *not* in the Linux kernel (*any* version).
There are external patches to implement it, but they are poorly done and slow the system down immensely. Not worth using.

Various kernel developers (me included) are trying to work out a better implementation for taking advantage of TRIM on Linux.

At present, the best thing is the wiper.sh script, which you can read about in the Linux part of these forums. It works well, quickly, and is probably best run once every few days.

So, here it is again: I'm Mark Lord, the guy behind the original Linux IDE, hdparm, parts of libata, and other stuff. Yes, I'm a Linux kernel hacker (full-time).

The current kernel.org kernels do NOT implement ATA TRIM. The main reason being, we still haven't agreed upon the best way to implement some form of automatic TRIM.

So, for now, one can run wiper.sh periodically, whenever one feels their drives require TRIM. This can be better than the automatic GC firmware, because it gives you direct control over when it happens, as opposed to the firmware doing it at the exact instant of a power failure or real-time critical operation.

The wiper.sh end-result should be better than what automatic GC can achieve, since we have more info about free blocks than GC does.

So, there is no ATA Trim in the kernel.

There is a git tree available, from which patches can be generated, to add TRIM to recent kernels. It doesn't work very well, and really slows down the system. Don't bother with that.

There is also now a git tree from Chris Mason, specifically to add TRIM for the experimental btrfs filesystem. I don't recommend that, either, though it probably does work better than the earlier patches did.

Cheers

So here was my questions and the answers:

1. I Use firmware 1.10 (v1370) Why should I upgrade to 1.3 using a Windows system I don't have at all and then to 1.40 ? Can I upgrade directly to 1.40, why not ? and will I loose data ?
2. I saw that the 1.40 upgrade ISO file, use linux and Freedos to update the firmware. Can I use directly Freedos on my existing Linux system to do the upgrade ? (So any linux LiveCD could upgrade the firmware)

I think you should be able to boot a freedos CD to upgrade to 1.30 without the use of Windows (or use the harshw-iso from the sticky section ).
Then you should use the 1.4 iso to upgrade to 1.4 (or 1.41GC whichever you prefer).

Both those upgrades are non-destructive, but make sure you have proper backups in case something goes wrong.

Linux users should use the 1.4.x to use the wiper.sh script.
Thanks to people in this forum.