[[!tag debian sysadmin luks discard ssd]]

I realised recently that my laptop isn't set up to send TRIM or DISCARD commands to its SSD. That means the SSD firmware has a harder time doing garbage collection (see whe linked Wikipedia page for more details.)

After some searching, I found two articles by Christopher Smart: one, update. Those, plus some addition reading of documentation, and a little experimentation, allowed me to do this. Since the information is a bit scattered, here's the details, for Debian stretch, as much for my own memory as to make sure this is collected into one place.

• Append ,discard to the fourth column on relevant lines in /etc/crypttab. For me, this means the fourth column should be luks,discard.
• Change in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf that says issue_discards to enable it (assign 1 instead of 0).
• Append rd.luks.options=discard to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT value in /etc/default/grub
• Run sudo update-grub
• Run sudo update-initramfs -u
• Reboot.
• Run sudo fstrim -av - if this works, you're good! If it gives you errors, then you get to debug. I have no idea what I'm talking about.
• Copy /usr/share/doc/util-linux/examples/fstrim.* to /etc/systemd/system and run sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer. This will tell systemd to run fstrim every week. (If you don't use systemd you'll have to adapt the systemd bits mentioned here. I've no idea how.)

Note that it seems to be a possible information leak to TRIM encryped devices. I don't know the details, but if that bothers you, don't do it.

I don't know of any harmful effects for enabling TRIM for everything, except the crypto bit above, so I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for the Debian installer to do this by default.