Debian trixie quirks

I've upgraded 3 of the machines in the farm so far and a few quirks I have noticed with trixie when compared with the previous version (bookworm).

1. The swap partition allocated is huge. By default it gave a 48G swap partition on a machine with 64G of memory (approx 75% of memory size).

2. tmpfs is now in memory, which is probably why they made the swap so big. You can set it back to being on disk but anything created in tmpfs will be slower. It will cleanup files in tmpfs if they are in memory. I switched the two machines with 64G of memory to use disk instead of memory as I rarely see anything in tmpfs.

3. The installation failed when I did a machine with only a 512G M.2 SSD. It ran out of disk space during the install. I had to upgrade the machine to a 1G M.2 SSD to install trixie. I was installing mate as a desktop without any additional software. If it made it through I would have removed various packages after the install, but it failed near the end of the installation without any warning so I didn't get a chance. Debian could update the installer or tasksel to check for available space.

 

Update 14 Sept 2025

I kept having issue 3 above on other machines that had a 1TB SSD's. It turned out that my caching proxy had a corrupt version of firefox-esr. I cleared the cache on that machine and did another install which forced it to download everything again. How it got a corrupt file is still a mystery but it hasn't had any issue since clearing the cache.

I've now updated all my x86-64 machines.

August 2025

Farm status
CPU only
Running some Milkyway and Einstein work from time to time.

Nvidia GPUs
Off.

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein@home work.

For more information on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster

 

Other news

The farm has been running in part for the last year although I haven't posted about it. Mainly its been the Raspberry Pis, with the CPU only machines running from time to time.

I am looking at upgrading the x86 machines. I have a couple of Ryzen 7900X machines to replace the Ryzen 5900X machines ie the CPU only part of the farm, but I am looking at the GPU crunchers now. I generally go for a low-end CPU (maybe a Ryzen 7600X) as its main purpose is to support the GPU. I had a quick look at the GTX-5060 Ti's which seem to have a higher clock speed but 200 or so less Cuda cores than what I have at the moment (GTX-3060 Ti's).

Debian Trixie is about a week or so out from release. While Debian seem to have added support for the Gnome 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3.6 desktops, the Mate desktop is the same one as Debian bookworm despite there being a more up-to-date version of Mate released in Feb 2024.

 

Update: 7th of August

I downloaded the trixie release candidate 2 and installed it on one of the Ryzen 5900X machines. Apart from the wallpaper and apt it looks the same as bookworm. The same installation instructions that I follow for bookworm worked without any changes.