From RHEL docs: "The default implementation of LUKS in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is AES 128 with a SHA256 hashing. Ciphers that are available are:
AES - Advanced Encryption Standard - FIPS PUB 197 Twofish (A 128-bit Block Cipher) Serpent cast5 - RFC 2144 cast6 - RFC 2612"
My question is: What will be the performance impact on my Celeron 1.73 GHz CPU and/or hdd speed?
Ljubomir Ljubojevic office@plnet.rs wrote:
What will be the performance impact on my Celeron 1.73 GHz CPU and/or hdd speed?
Well, the usual "it depends on your [exact] environment" is the real answer.
However from a subjective perspective I've found that the only time that I've really noticed a performance impact is during lots of I/O, such as a *large* tarball extraction. (Presumably writing a large file would be similar.) Eclipse, for example, touches a huge amount of files but encryption on the underyling filesystem is not generally noticable. It can be more noticable on a single core, single thread CPU.
If you have a server doing significant continuous I/O, probably benchmarking is the only reasonable way to tell.
Devin
On 01/08/2012 12:56 AM, Devin Reade wrote:
Ljubomir Ljubojevicoffice@plnet.rs wrote:
What will be the performance impact on my Celeron 1.73 GHz CPU and/or hdd speed?
Well, the usual "it depends on your [exact] environment" is the real answer.
However from a subjective perspective I've found that the only time that I've really noticed a performance impact is during lots of I/O, such as a *large* tarball extraction. (Presumably writing a large file would be similar.) Eclipse, for example, touches a huge amount of files but encryption on the underyling filesystem is not generally noticable. It can be more noticable on a single core, single thread CPU.
If you have a server doing significant continuous I/O, probably benchmarking is the only reasonable way to tell.
Hm, I forgot to mention that it would be for laptop. MSI VR601x, Celeron 1.73 GHz (Single Core), 80 GB SATA, 2GB RAM, CentOS 6.2 x86_64, encryption would be activated by Anaconda on ext4 partitions belonging to LVM Volume Group.
Ljubomir Ljubojevic office@plnet.rs wrote:
Hm, I forgot to mention that it would be for laptop. MSI VR601x, Celeron 1.73 GHz (Single Core), 80 GB SATA, 2GB RAM, CentOS 6.2 x86_64, encryption would be activated by Anaconda on ext4 partitions belonging to LVM Volume Group.
I had guessed that you were talking about a laptop; the server comment was only for completeness.
Although I have since replaced it with a Thinkpad T500, I used to run a Thinkpad T42 (which is a 32 bit system at around the same clock speed, with the same amount of memory) using full disk encryption under CentOS 5.6. As a general workstation it was just fine. Using it as a development system running eclipse, tomcat, db2, plus the usual desktop programs was, toward the end, causing it to start to chug, but I don't think that that was primarily due to encryption; I think available memory and processor speed for non-encryption tasks were the limiting factors. It also used a PATA disk, not SATA.
Devin
Ljubomir Ljubojevic writes:
From RHEL docs: "The default implementation of LUKS in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is AES 128 with a SHA256 hashing. Ciphers that are available are:
AES - Advanced Encryption Standard - FIPS PUB 197 Twofish (A 128-bit Block Cipher) Serpent cast5 - RFC 2144 cast6 - RFC 2612"My question is: What will be the performance impact on my Celeron 1.73 GHz CPU and/or hdd speed?
I can't give any numbers, but I've been using luks for years now and while it sure adds a performance hit I don't find it really noticeable (especially on latest cpus) during normal use (web browsing, emails, films, office etc). Think of it this way, that laptop is already slow, at least now it will be secure. :-)
On 01/07/2012 06:40 PM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
What will be the performance impact on my Celeron 1.73 GHz CPU and/or hdd speed?
To further add to what has been said, check if your particular CPU supports the AES-NI instruction set which should provide some performance boost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set
Of course, that is, if you choose to use the AES cipher (the default).
HTH, Jorge
On 01/08/2012 02:13 PM, Jorge Fábregas wrote:
On 01/07/2012 06:40 PM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
What will be the performance impact on my Celeron 1.73 GHz CPU and/or hdd speed?
To further add to what has been said, check if your particular CPU supports the AES-NI instruction set which should provide some performance boost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set
Of course, that is, if you choose to use the AES cipher (the default).
My laptop is 3-4 years old, no AES addon in it. And I can see only high end CPU's have them, so I will not be buying one sore several years (I also use laptop in the field, grain silos, etc so I will not buy anything that is expensive).
But thanks for the info, to all of you of course.
Ljubomir Ljubojevic writes:
My laptop is 3-4 years old, no AES addon in it. And I can see only high end CPU's have them, so I will not be buying one sore several years (I also use laptop in the field, grain silos, etc so I will not buy anything that is expensive).
Then all the more reason to use encryption if the machine is going to be so much moved around (and at higher risk of being stolen etc).
Cheerio
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Devin Reade -
Jorge Fábregas -
Ljubomir Ljubojevic -
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