15 Nov
2014
15 Nov
'14
2:10 a.m.
On 11/14/2014 07:58 AM, William Light wrote:
I'm using luks/LVM on my Thinkpad T430s, using a
-ck kernel and I've got
16Gb of RAM. I don't notice or perceive a slowdown at all, even though I
bet e.g. startup would be a little snappier without encryption on. I
haven't A/B tested it, encryption is just a prerequisite for my systems
these days, and the performance is still excellent.
Nice. That machine has a Core i7-2530M processor, which also has Secure
Key (e.g. hardware pseudo-random number generator, PRNG):
http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T430s-23539WU-Notebook/dp/B009UESY2I
http://ark.intel.com/products/64893/Intel-Core-i7-3520M-Processor-4M-Cache-…
So, you should be able to generate pseudo-random numbers very quickly.
This will expedite erasing encrypted partitions and devices, generating
white noise, and other uses.
Here's a crude PRN benchmark for my Pentium 4 3.4E GHz HT machine:
2014-11-14 16:58:52 dpchrist@p43400e ~
$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 13.0431 s, 8.0 MB/s
And, for my Core i7-2600S machine:
2014-11-14 17:00:09 dpchrist@i72600s ~
$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 6.90355 s, 15.2 MB/s
(It appears that /dev/urandom uses a single thread, as the Pentium as
one core and the i7 has four, but the i7 isn't four times faster.)
How well does your laptop perform on the above /dev/urandom benchmark?
/dev/random blocks waiting for entropy on both of the above machines.
How about your laptop?
David