How To Install eatmydata on Ubuntu 22.04

In this tutorial we learn how to install eatmydata on Ubuntu 22.04. eatmydata is Library and utilities designed to disable fsync and friends

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install eatmydata on Ubuntu 22.04.

What is eatmydata

eatmydata is:

This package contains a small LD_PRELOAD library (libeatmydata) and a couple of helper utilities designed to transparently disable fsync and friends (like open(O_SYNC)). This has two side-effects: making software that writes data safely to disk a lot quicker and making this software no longer crash safe.

You will find eatmydata useful if particular software calls fsync(), sync() etc. frequently but the data it stores is not that valuable to you and you may afford losing it in case of system crash. Data-to-disk synchronization calls are typically very slow on modern file systems and their extensive usage might slow down software significantly. It does not make sense to accept such a hit in performance if data being manipulated is not very important.

On the other hand, do not use eatmydata when you care about what software stores or it manipulates important components of your system. The library is called libEAT-MY-DATA for a reason.

There are three methods to install eatmydata on Ubuntu 22.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install eatmydata Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install eatmydata using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install eatmydata

Install eatmydata Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install eatmydata using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install eatmydata

Install eatmydata Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install eatmydata using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install eatmydata

How To Uninstall eatmydata on Ubuntu 22.04

To uninstall only the eatmydata package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove eatmydata

Uninstall eatmydata And Its Dependencies

To uninstall eatmydata and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 22.04, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove eatmydata

Remove eatmydata Configurations and Data

To remove eatmydata configuration and data from Ubuntu 22.04 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge eatmydata

Remove eatmydata configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove eatmydata configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge eatmydata

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install eatmydata package on Ubuntu 22.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.