Hello,
I suppose that by now some of you have realized that I'm working on setting up my new computer. ;) The new question is whether I should encrypt the whole hard disk, including the swap partition (minus, possibly, a read-only mounted /boot). Just so I don't need to worry in case my computer gets stolen for worth in metal one day. Mind you, I have a quadcore (the kernel counts 8 CPUs), and I plan on hardware RAID-5 (Intel P55) with three 1 TB hard disks, not yet implemented (when I upgrade, I upgrade). RAM sums up to 4 GB. So I ran a small test. /secret is an encrypted partition. My home directory is not. While the encrypted write ran, I had more or less one CPU at 100% and seven others doing nothing. The results below are consistent and repeatable on my computer. Reads to /dev/null take grossly the same time as write. [...@short ~]$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/secret/zeros.delme bs=1M count=16k 16384+0 records in 16384+0 records out 17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 158.784 s, 108 MB/s real 2m38.822s user 0m0.015s sys 0m13.655s [...@short ~]$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=zeros.delme bs=1M count=16k 16384+0 records in 16384+0 records out 17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 228.711 s, 75.1 MB/s real 3m49.069s user 0m0.010s sys 0m25.029s Aha! Encryption actually speeds up the write! Well, not really, I suppose. Maybe it has to do with /secret being untouched until now, and the cleartext disk being somewhat fragmented by now. But this little test makes me wonder if I pay anything at all for this (expect for a piece of unused CPU power). If there is any reason in the world not to encrypt the whole chunk. Inputs are welcome. Eli -- Web: http://www.billauer.co.il _______________________________________________ Haifux mailing list Haifux@haifux.org http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haifux