Feature #12860
open
add mmc-utils package to all images
0%
Description
Both Netgate & 3rd party hardware integrators are increasingly using eMMC components.
SATA (& historically SCSI) drives have offered SMART reporting & analysis - however SMART does not work with eMMC drives.
eMMC v5.0 standard (published in 2013) specifies simple access to eMMC lifetime estimates & EOL info via extcsd data:mmc extcsd read /dev/mmcsd0rpmb | egrep -i ^emmc
Fortunately there already exists a FreeBSD port of mmc-utils package which is tiny (40-60kB) and so could be easily added into pfSense images.
Hopefully a simple means of GUI access (eg Diagnostics / eMMC Status) to access these lifetime estimates & EOL info could also be considered.
Updated by Steve Y almost 3 years ago
This would be helpful/useful now that ZFS is the new default, and/or for folks who don't realize some packages are "required" or recommended to use an SSD (https://www.netgate.com/supported-pfsense-plus-packages).
Forum thread: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/170128/emmc-write-endurance/
Updated by Jim Pingle almost 3 years ago
- Project changed from pfSense to pfSense Packages
- Category changed from S.M.A.R.T. to New Package Request
- Release Notes deleted (
Default)
We already build mmc-utils for Plus and it can be installed manually from the CLI. Trying to build a GUI around it to make any kind of interpretation of the results is trickier. The values people are interested in are largely estimates and may not bear any relation to the actual situation on the disk. We've already been monitoring its output on a variety of hardware of different ages trying to see if it's a reliable metric. We don't want to present a big scary red flag warning a user if it's unwarranted.
I'm not sure it would need to be built into all base system images, especially CE. We could consider at least enable building it and offering it in the CE package repository as we do for Plus.