On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:01:42 -0400 Peter Constantinidis <peter@constantinidis.ca> wrote:

Hi:

I have a SSD.. I was wondering if the new installer contains options to allow for partition alignment? Alignment is critical for SSDs.. needs to be done 3 times..

1st with fdisk. we use cfdisk

2nd for dmcrypt the option: --align-payload (with appropriate value)

3rd for LVM: pvcreate --dataalignment (with appropriate value)

When creating filesystems, you can optionally specify additional options for the appropriate program (mkfs, pvcreate, cryptsetup, etc)

If it doesn't, then the need to do it all manually still exists if one has a SSD. I'm thinking a series of questions like "do you have a ssd?" Y -> "do you know the block size?" Y-> "512k" and then it would enter the appropriate values for all commands based on the hardware block size of the SSD.

I don't want to hand-hold any more then we do now. Maybe we should put a note in the installation guide to use those options.

The other thing I am thinking is, if Arch is supposed to force people to read and do everything manually, then wouldn't this installer script begin to venture into pre-packaged territory?

Don't know what you mean with "pre-packaged territory" but there are definitely some sentiments that our interactive installer is trying too hard and is not KISS. See http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-releng/2009-August/000721.html Note that you can also do automated installations. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide#Automa...

All the best, P.

Disclaimer: I have never installed Arch but I am very interested in it.

Dieter