linux/Documentation/device-mapper/dm-crypt.txt
Mikulas Patocka 0f5d8e6ee7 dm crypt: add 'submit_from_crypt_cpus' option
Make it possible to disable offloading writes by setting the optional
'submit_from_crypt_cpus' table argument.

There are some situations where offloading write bios from the
encryption threads to a single thread degrades performance
significantly.

The default is to offload write bios to the same thread because it
benefits CFQ to have writes submitted using the same IO context.

Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
2015-02-16 11:11:15 -05:00

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dm-crypt
=========
Device-Mapper's "crypt" target provides transparent encryption of block devices
using the kernel crypto API.
For a more detailed description of supported parameters see:
http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/wiki/DMCrypt
Parameters: <cipher> <key> <iv_offset> <device path> \
<offset> [<#opt_params> <opt_params>]
<cipher>
Encryption cipher and an optional IV generation mode.
(In format cipher[:keycount]-chainmode-ivmode[:ivopts]).
Examples:
des
aes-cbc-essiv:sha256
twofish-ecb
/proc/crypto contains supported crypto modes
<key>
Key used for encryption. It is encoded as a hexadecimal number.
You can only use key sizes that are valid for the selected cipher
in combination with the selected iv mode.
Note that for some iv modes the key string can contain additional
keys (for example IV seed) so the key contains more parts concatenated
into a single string.
<keycount>
Multi-key compatibility mode. You can define <keycount> keys and
then sectors are encrypted according to their offsets (sector 0 uses key0;
sector 1 uses key1 etc.). <keycount> must be a power of two.
<iv_offset>
The IV offset is a sector count that is added to the sector number
before creating the IV.
<device path>
This is the device that is going to be used as backend and contains the
encrypted data. You can specify it as a path like /dev/xxx or a device
number <major>:<minor>.
<offset>
Starting sector within the device where the encrypted data begins.
<#opt_params>
Number of optional parameters. If there are no optional parameters,
the optional paramaters section can be skipped or #opt_params can be zero.
Otherwise #opt_params is the number of following arguments.
Example of optional parameters section:
3 allow_discards same_cpu_crypt submit_from_crypt_cpus
allow_discards
Block discard requests (a.k.a. TRIM) are passed through the crypt device.
The default is to ignore discard requests.
WARNING: Assess the specific security risks carefully before enabling this
option. For example, allowing discards on encrypted devices may lead to
the leak of information about the ciphertext device (filesystem type,
used space etc.) if the discarded blocks can be located easily on the
device later.
same_cpu_crypt
Perform encryption using the same cpu that IO was submitted on.
The default is to use an unbound workqueue so that encryption work
is automatically balanced between available CPUs.
submit_from_crypt_cpus
Disable offloading writes to a separate thread after encryption.
There are some situations where offloading write bios from the
encryption threads to a single thread degrades performance
significantly. The default is to offload write bios to the same
thread because it benefits CFQ to have writes submitted using the
same context.
Example scripts
===============
LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is now the preferred way to set up disk
encryption with dm-crypt using the 'cryptsetup' utility, see
http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
[[
#!/bin/sh
# Create a crypt device using dmsetup
dmsetup create crypt1 --table "0 `blockdev --getsize $1` crypt aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 babebabebabebabebabebabebabebabe 0 $1 0"
]]
[[
#!/bin/sh
# Create a crypt device using cryptsetup and LUKS header with default cipher
cryptsetup luksFormat $1
cryptsetup luksOpen $1 crypt1
]]