Hi, > I run a T1000 which is segregated into a couple of LDOM guests (about 10). > Some of the guests use softraid crypto inside. The host does not.
Yeah, I was planning on using LDOMs as well. However, since I wanted to put this into a datacenter (for a cheap price, so it not being the most current hardware is OK), I wanted to encrypt as much as possible. > Disk i/o is slow across the board, and when one guest upgrades (extracts > sets) or makes builds, the other guests experience slowed down i/o as well. Without the crypto, I get 30 - 40 MB/s. Granted, that's still slow for 10k RPM drives. However, the RAID 1 is still rebuilding, so that might be why. > It's fine for network-bound tasks but I would not run a database or mail > server on it, if that's what you were planning to use this box for. I was planning to use it for a small mail server (only my mail + my family's mail), a web server, a git server and and XMPP server. So I guess that would be a bad idea? > In the near term I am planning to replace the disks with SSDs to see if > that helps. This requires the 2.5" disk frame which isn't easy to track > down, or some self-built disk frame which holds a 2.5" disk. I guess I'm lucky then, as mine came with two 2.5" SAS disks. > I've never used this system with just the host. The OpenBSD kernel is > mostly giant-locked so having many CPUs for one kernel doesn't make sense. Yeah, that was exactly my fear: The GKL stalling the entire systems. Which seems to be what's happening here. > If you're running your tests without any LDOM guests configured, your > system is probably using something in the order of 32 CPUs. In which case > reducing the number of CPUs on the host by assigning some CPUs to guests > might help a bit. See 'man ldomctl' for details about setting up guests. Hm, my main problem seems to be that whenever I decrypt something from the disk, all other 23 cores seem to get stalled. So, would you recommend doing the following then: * Have a partition for the main system on a softraid crypto * Have an unencrypted partition for the LDOMs * Do softraid crypto in every LDOM That would at least mean one system reading from disk will not stall all the other systems. Just out of curiosity, what read performance do you get in one of the LDOMs where you do use softraid crypto? 2 MB/s just seems too low, IMHO, when openssl speed can reach 5 times that. -- Jonathan
