log2ram support

1st Official Post

    New to LibreELEC, but not OSMC. Am configuring a new RPi4 libreElec on 9.1.002. Tried to install log2ram, which failed completely, since all directories it needs write access to are read only. Is log2ram functionality a benefit under LibreELEC? (and if not, other suggestions as to reducing SSD writes under this OS, if not log2ram?). Thanks.

  • Go to Best Answer

    I would like to think (!!!?!?!) that surely these guys are already doing whatever they can, to reduce SDCard utilisation in LibreElec.

    Perhaps I'm wrong though - I do have a weekly job set up to back up my SDCard in full, so I can just 'burn' a new one in 5 minutes for $10 and I'm done - I even keep a spare.

    • Official Post

    You realise that on anything with 1GB+ RAM we already load the entire OS into RAM? .. and the amount of read/write generated by Kodi on /storage is not particularly high - not high enough to make those solutions worth chasing.

    • Best Answer

    /var (and thus /var/log) are already in RAM so log2ram won't provide any benefit. Also note that by default the systemd journal is only kept in RAM (without being written to /var/log/journal) unless you add "debugging" to the kernel command line - which enables permanent journal logging to /storage.

    Kodi's log (/storage/.kodi/temp/kodi.log) will always be written to SD card (though that's not too many writes, unless you enable debug logging in kodi).

    so long,

    Hias

    Thanks HiassofT for the information. It is something I could not find anywhere else.

    I noticed that .kodi/temp has more stuff than just kodi.log, kodi.old.log and crashes.

    It has archive_cache and temporary scrapping information. I've never had to go back to any of these in 4 years and thought it would be wise to move them all to ram. And to do it in a way that could be reverted if I ever needed to investigate an issue.

    This is what I ended up doing. It works fine for me, but it might be a nicer way to do it.

    Code
    # cd /storage/.kodi
# mv temp temp_original
# ln -s /var/log temp
# reboot

    Upon reboot all the folder structure inside temp gets created. Remember that the initial temp folder was moved to temp_original.

    If you need to investigate anything, even by enabling debug, you can still go to /storage/.kodi/temp/kodi.log it will all be there.

    The only caveat is that it will dissapear after reboot. But this can be sorted temporarily by undoing the above temporarily:

    Code
    # cd /storage/.kodi
# mv temp temp_in_ram
# mv temp_original temp

    Edited once, last by felichas (May 7, 2021 at 3:01 PM).