When will we see TRIM support for GELI volumes ?

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 19.03.13 03:11, Thomas Steen Rasmussen wrote:
> Have you tried using an SSD without TRIM support ? It really is 
> awfully slow, I'm talking 10-20-30 seconds freezes while the disk is 
> writing.

There are different SSD disks, just as there are different beers. Many 
SSDs that do not offer TRIP (or you not use it) perform just fine and 
you can hardly ever saturate them on a laptop. These just cost more. 
Having said that, there should be really way to use cheaper components, 
that greatly benefit (to a point) from TRIM. But, you have to balance 
your act.

By the way, many SSDs perform awfully on writes with an sector size of 
512b. Try setting the sector size to 4096 (for example) and see if this 
will make any difference for you.

The comment before about TRIM being bad idea with encrypted storage is 
very valid. You don't want anyone to know the layout of the data on the 
drive. Considering, that today anyone can have access to huge computing 
farms, anything that can make the task of decrypting more difficult is 
more than welcome. If you want to be safe, just use more performant 
drive and encrypt it all, with no gaps. The bigger the drive, the safer 
your data is.

Of course, as with everything UNIX, you should be allowed to shoot 
yourself in the foot. Maybe name the sysctl that activates TRIM on GELI 
something like kern.geom.eli.insecure_trim :)

Daniel