[Bug 193124] GELI data integrity verification should consider sparse zero pass-through

From: <bugzilla-noreply_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2024 22:01:59 UTC
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=193124

Xin LI <delphij@FreeBSD.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |delphij@FreeBSD.org
         Resolution|---                         |Not Accepted
             Status|New                         |Closed

--- Comment #1 from Xin LI <delphij@FreeBSD.org> ---
Although I think this is an useful feature request to some extent, it's not
really trivial to implement because in order to support it the GELI model has
to keep track of which block is presumed to be zero's, and that bookkeeping
information has to be stored somewhere.  There are legitimate reasons to always
perform full initialization of the provider, by the way, because the size of
data stored in the encrypted storage is revealed if that's not done, for
example.

A more generic solution would probably be making GELI init to perform the
initialization in background and have it mark the provider as "need
initialization", and upon attach the provider initializes itself in the
background.  This, however, would complicate the provider quite a bit because
it needs to be able to recover from power outage, etc. without damaging data. 
(This may be a good candidate for a summer of project project).

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.