[Discuss] linux on usb stick

[gboyce at badbelly.com (Gregory Boyce)]

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com>wrote:

> Stephen Adler wrote:
>
>> Now here's an interesting test point. When I run linux on the usb memory
>> stick through VMware on my desktop, the response is phenomianl. No
>> delay. It's snippy. The big test is surf to the daily show and fire up
>> one of Jon Stewarts show, in full screen. Runs like a charm.
>>
>
> That's because VMware heavily caches I/O. Direct USB flash I/O performance
> is somewhere between poor and abysmal. This is compounded by using anything
> other than ext2. Journaling destroys USB flash I/O performance through
> excessive writes. This is the most significant reason why I eventually gave
> up on the idea of trying to run Linux directly off USB flash as any kind of
> daily driver. It can be made to work, but it can't be made to work well.


ext4 in general performs much better than ext2, and you can disable the
journal when you create the filesystem with "-O ^has_journal".

--
Greg