SD card corruption - tmpfs and swap approach

alexxx

I just had my 2nd SD corruption on retropie - due to hard reboots that can happen when dealing with ROMs of uncertain origin...
The cards where both high quality and non-chinese.
I have a pair of Raspberries doing other chores around here, and they run smoothly since forever despite occasional crashes, thanks to a tuning of the tmpfs and the swap file systems , from an old recipe I found here http://ideaheap.com/2013/07/stopping-sd-card-corruption-on-a-raspberry-pi/

So I was wondering if something like this could be applied to the Retropie, or instead if the emulators require that I leave it alone ...

what do you think?

mitu

@alexxx The improvements suggested in that post (which is quite old, btw) are already implemented in Raspbian, the OS used by the RetroPie image:

/tmp is mounted in memory
the / partition is mounted with noatime
/var/run is mounted in memory (already acknowledged in the article)
/dev/shm is also mounted in memory - this is where the logs from emulators that are running or the temp configuration files are stored.
swap is not used unless installing from source for a few memory intensive compilation with packages like EmulationStation. In this case a temporary swap file is created during the compilation, and deleted afterwards.

alexxx

@mitu thank you for the answer...
I know the post is old, but it served me well along the years.
I'm happy to know that Raspbian uses this tricks already - although it still leaves me with the problem of my cards' corruption - probably it's just that I leave it switched on 24/7 - you never know when the desire to play Pastfinder will come to you :-)

zerojay

I have my root FS on a hard drive. I still get corruptions and problems even when everything's unmounted cleanly.

BuZz

@mitu said in SD card corruption - tmpfs and swap approach:

/tmp is mounted in memory

This is not default on the RetroPie/Raspbian image afair. /tmp is on the sdcard.

swap is not used unless installing from source for a few memory intensive compilation with packages like EmulationStation. In this case a temporary swap file is created during the compilation, and deleted afterwards.

Swap is created and used as needed. RetroPie can add additional swap for some package building, but the system does come with some swap enabled as default.

mitu

@buzz said in SD card corruption - tmpfs and swap approach:

@mitu said in SD card corruption - tmpfs and swap approach:

/tmp is mounted in memory

This is not default on the RetroPie/Raspbian image afair. /tmp is on the sdcard.

You're right, this is the default in Debian, but it seems not in Raspbian.

cyperghost

@mitu You're right
files created in /tmp get vanished after reboot but it's not mountend in memory. It's just emptied after a reboot. This seems to make no difference (someone might think) but if you do heavy writing to /tmp this will cost SD-card lifecycles ;)
You can check with df /tmp
It will output mountpoint /

My output of df is

pi@retropie:~ $ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        3714944  3172340    356232  90% /
devtmpfs          370708        0    370708   0% /dev
tmpfs             375316        0    375316   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs             375316     5252    370064   2% /run
tmpfs               5120        4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             375316        0    375316   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1     58234    21536     36698  37% /boot
/dev/sda1       31158272 23856128   7302144  77% /media/usb0

Sano

For information, I formatted my root partition with F2FS more than a year ago, and never had a corruption since.
The main drawback is that it's more difficult to resize ATM than ext4 or xfs.