On Mon, Feb 06, 2017 at 11:15:59AM +0100, Ondrej Kozina wrote:
On 02/03/2017 05:42 PM, Nathanael D. Noblet wrote:
>
> Also what are the risks of enabling this?
There's nice overview for it:
http://asalor.blogspot.cz/2011/08/trim-dm-crypt-problems.html
In short (beside other facts covered in blog):
A very simple analysis of encrypted block device with discard passdown
enabled (fstrim command on upper layer is allowed to hit block device
underneath the dm-crypt target) may expose presence of particular fs type.
It creates well visible patterns (interleaving chunks of zeroes with chunks
of random data) but no ciphertext is jeopardized in any way!
Simply put with discard passdown enabled it'll be much harder to deny
_existence_ of encrypted fs on SSDs alone.
The reasoning for the change is that most users expects theirs SSD to
operate in full performance (moreover, overall dm-crypt performance within
multi CPU systems was vastly improved with kernel 4.0:
https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.0#head-c0673746b8f925cd7013db3bf2a1ae1b...)
and they experienced major performance hit after some time of use even
though they enabled fstrim.service & co. Most complains we heard were
exactly those above. Experienced admins are already aware of /etc/crypttab
and may revert the change very easily and existing storage setup will not be
affected.
Admins can revert the change, but if a TRIM has already occurred, that
can't be reversed without rewriting the affected sections of the drive.