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I'm running VMware Workstation 12, and am trying to have it see SCSI0:0 as an SSD drive.

I want to have the discard mount option and fstrim / work on ext4 and btrfs.

I added the following to my .vmx file: scsi0:0.virtualSSD = 1

But in Linux (both Mint 17.2 and Manjaro 16.08, /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational contains 1, meaning it's not a spindle and platter disk.

However, smartctl -a /dev/sda disagrees:

smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.16.0-38-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               VMware,
Product:              VMware Virtual S
Revision:             1.0
User Capacity:        274,877,906,944 bytes [274 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Rotation Rate:        Solid State Device
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Tue Oct 25 08:35:07 2016 ICT
SMART support is:     Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

Error Counter logging not supported

Device does not support Self Test logging

How do I get rotational to be 0 (and thence get TRIM working?)

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  • Are you sure VMware advertises the TRIM command for its virtual drives? What are actually trying to accomplish, auto-shrinking images? – Daniel B Nov 10 '16 at 21:55
  • Relevant source code: lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/scsi/sd.c?v=4.7#L2731 - you could hack in a few printk to debug, see same file for example. – Daniel B Nov 10 '16 at 22:18
  • @Daniel B This seems to indicate that it should support TRIM. Yes, I'm trying to auto-shrink images - they are constantly growing in size – Tom Hale Nov 13 '16 at 3:02
  • I don’t see anything indicating TRIM support there. Indeed, the only thing I found was about vSphere 6.0, but it wasn’t about auto-shrinking images. I’m quite sure VMware Workstation doesn’t support this. – Daniel B Nov 13 '16 at 9:41

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