freebsd encrypted hard disk?

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:55:38PM +0000, RW wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:59:54 +0100
> Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> >  Geli is
> > convenient and seems to work well. On modern machines the performance
> > penalty is slight. It supports well-regarded encryption algorithms
> > like AES and Blowfish.
> 
> It depends on what you mean by modern, and slight, on my single-core
> amd64 2.8G the performance penalty of geli is substantial.

True for a single-core machine.

> Not just in reduced transfer rates, but also in terms of CPU cycles
> used - a sustained geli to geli file copy makes things really slow for
> me.

That's probably because two geli kernel threads are competing for time
on a single core. I've had problems with that as well (geli-encrypted
USB drive stalling).

Since I've switched to a multi-core machine (where the number of cores
should be at least equal to the number of geli-encrypted devices), CPU
load for gele has dropped to barely noticable.

Looking at the machines on sale at local computer stores only the
absolute rock-bottom spec-ed machines are single core these days.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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