I have an 128 GB SSD installed in my laptop (Samsung 840 Pro) on a Sata 3 interface. This laptop also has an i5 3210m Ivy Bridge Intel processor and 8 GB of RAM.
I installed Ubuntu 12.10, using the graphical installer to get full-disk encryption. I am kind of disappointed, because I was expecting the specs I have to yield better results than what I get.
While looking at this SSD Benchmarking page it claims that my processor is able to do:
- ~500 MB/s : With AES-NI
- ~200 MB/s : Without AES-NI
Looking at the numbers I get, I think I may not have AES-NI enabled. But first ...
Reading unencrypted data is fast:
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
Timing cached reads: 14814 MB in 2.00 seconds = 7411.70 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 242 MB in 0.48 seconds = 502.75 MB/sec
That's actually close to my SSD's specs of "up to 530 MB/s" and doing a dd
test yields similar results to the above.
Writing encrypted data is fast too with dm-crypt (otherwise with eCryptfs the performance on writing is abysmal, lower than 100 MB/s), the numbers being close to the SSD spec (I guess writing is buffered or something):
# dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 conv=fdatasync,notrunc
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.93896 s, 365 MB/s
Reading encrypted data is however another story:
# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
# dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.85956 s, 183 MB/s
While writing this message, I actually got lucky to get 183 MB/s, because this number varies. Normally it's somewhere around 150 MB/s, but I also got close to 300 MB/s on a fresh boot, but then performance drops gradually to under 200 MB/s without me starting any apps. Do note that while conducting this test I have no other processes that are doing I/O (as seen with iotop
).
Also, here's the test with hdparm
which yields worse results:
# hdparm -Tt /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt:
Timing cached reads: 14816 MB in 2.00 seconds = 7412.86 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 422 MB in 3.01 seconds = 140.11 MB/sec
I also tried the experiment by looking at htop
... not sure how to interpret what I saw, since the i5 processor does Hyper-Threading, but 2 threads out of 4 where going to about 73% of usage during the test, while the other 2 threads where left unused. Indeed, if I start 2 processes that are reading with dd
from 2 distinct files (to prevent buffering), then iotop
reports a total of approx 400 MB/s. So this definitely feels like it's CPU-bound.
My disappointment comes from the fact that my i5 processor is capable of AES-NI. Unencrypted data is being read at over 500 MB/s using the same tests I did above. So we are talking about an encrypted partition being at least 3 times slower.
I don't really know if my dm-crypt install is using AES-NI. Here's the output of lsmod
:
# lsmod | grep aes
aesni_intel 51038 35
cryptd 20404 10 ghash_clmulni_intel,aesni_intel
aes_x86_64 17256 1 aesni_intel
Here's the output of cryptsetup
:
# cryptsetup status sda2_crypt
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt is active and is in use.
type: LUKS1
cipher: aes-xts-plain64
keysize: 512 bits
device: /dev/sda2
offset: 4096 sectors
size: 249565184 sectors
mode: read/write
flags: discards
So, is this expected? Shouldn't AES-NI improve things more than this?
Also, how to disable AES-NI to see if there's any difference? And maybe I should enable it somehow, but haven't found any tips in my searches.
Thanks,