ASL 2.0.0-beta Recommendation for Raspberry Pi

If you’re using the new beta on Pi, you may want to install log2ram to extend the life of your SD card. This will be included in 2.0.0-beta.4.

Installation:

sudo echo "deb http://packages.azlux.fr/debian/ buster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azlux.list
sudo wget -qO - https://azlux.fr/repo.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt update
sudo apt install log2ram
sudo reboot

Additionally, add this to the end of your /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid 0 0

Cheers,
Rob
KK9ROB

I don’t understand, why is this needed? Why would ASL2.0.0 beta ruin a SD Card?

This only applies to the Raspberry Pi. SSDs with proper wear leveling will be fine.

It won’t ruin it necessarily – it just potentially reduces the life of the SD card without this change. If you have a high endurance SD card or name brand one this isn’t much of an issue – cheaper cards tend to be vulnerable to degradation.

Simply put, SD cards and similar technologies use something called “NAND” storage. Over time, continuously writing to a NAND storage device will make small sections of that storage unusable. Eventually, the device will experience data corruption. The less writes a NAND device has, the longer it potentially lasts.

In the latest beta image, we are storing logs and temporary files in RAM instead of on the SD card. This reduces the number of writes significantly. These changes weren’t included in previous versions.

Adding the log2ram package and adding that line to /etc/fstab fix that. :slight_smile:

Hope I explained it well enough!

We recommend using a high endurance SD card in all Pi nodes, regardless of these changes. If you type “high endurance sd card” into Amazon you can see an example of these cards. They have almost no difference in price. Stick with a name brand like Samsung or Sandisk for best results.

Cheers,
Rob