Re: aes-xts-plain with aes_x86_64 makes my SSD 5x slower than my encrypted HD

[Marc MERLIN <marc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 09:47:32PM +0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> > Any suggestions would be appreciated. 
> 
> I'm using Debian sid (so still at 3.2 kernel), currently using a 256G
> Samsung SSD. What I get is:
> 
> root@scapa:~# hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/mapper/scapa_crypt 
> 
> /dev/sda:
>  Timing buffered disk reads: 690 MB in  3.01 seconds = 229.47 MB/sec
 
> /dev/mapper/scapa_crypt:
>  Timing buffered disk reads: 590 MB in  3.00 seconds = 196.43 MB/sec

Right, that's more what I would expect.

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 10:22:13PM +0200, Heinz Diehl wrote:
> I don't know why reading speed is that slow in your case, especially
> as you are using AES-NI, which should give you the highest speed
> available. Maybe others here on the list have a suggestion. Probably,
> you should provide some more information.
 
I'm happy to if you tell me what else I can give.
Note how my test showed that I had the same aes-xts-plain on the hard drive
in the same laptop, and that one runs at 100MB/s, which is pretty much its
native speed.

Just to make sure that I'm not CPU limited, I tried 
gandalfthegreat:~# dd if=/dev/sda4 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.23959 s, 479 MB/s

gandalfthegreat:~# dd if=/dev/mapper/ssdcrypt of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 44.3302 s, 24.2 MB/s

atop shows dd isn't really pegging a single core:
THR    SYSCPU   USRCPU     RDDSK   WRDSK   ST  EXC   S  CPUNR    CPU  CMD 
  1     0.60s    0.01s    226.2M      0K   --    -   D      3     6%  dd

> Otherwise, on the newer Intel i3/i5/i7, twofish-3way is faster than
> AES. You could try to re-format your drive with twofish-xts-plain64
> and adding twofish_common, twofish_x86_64 and twofish_x86_64_3way to
> your initram (as long as your kernel is built with these enabled).

Thanks for the hint.
Since it's a lenovo T530 with a recent CPU, I tried it:

gandalfthegreat:~# cryptsetup -c twofish-xts-plain64 -s 256 luksFormat /dev/sda4 

Result is the same:
gandalfthegreat:~# hdparm -tT /dev/mapper/ssdcrypt 

/dev/mapper/ssdcrypt:
 Timing cached reads:   16614 MB in  2.00 seconds = 8317.50 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  68 MB in  3.08 seconds =  22.09 MB/sec

Grumble.

It shouldn't be a hardware problem since I do see 400MB/s before encryption.

I'm a bit lost here. I'll try other kernels just in case, but that shouldn't
make a difference.

Thanks for the answers,
Marc
-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/  
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