Re: [PLUG] RAID for swap?

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 01:28:54PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> If you do put swap on raid I wouldn't do it on top of a file - every
> layer hurts performance.  I'd keep it simple.  Keep in mind that if a
> consumer drive fails on a consumer motherboard there is a chance that
> your whole system or the other drives will hang due to hardware
> glitches - consumer motherboards don't do as good a job isolating
> individual drives as a server board does.

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 02:37:38PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> Good point - I'd recommend encrypting your swap - the cpu hit isn't
> that bad, and it adds quite a bit of security (all kinds of stuff
> can end up in swap - even stuff that would otherwise be encrypted on
> disk (though most distros allow non-root apps to lock some RAM so
> there is no execuse for this).  I encrypt mine - and a new key is
> created on each boot (the key is never saved anywhere - it is lost
> on shutdown).

First of all, let me say that I've never used RAID or LVM except as a
user, and I've never encrypted my swap partition.  I have, however,
used both swap files and I've found them to be a lot more flexible
than swap partitions.  I'm curious why you're concerned about the
performance hit for swap files vs partitions, but you're not worried
about the performance hit for encrypting your entire swap partition.
I'd think the encryption would be slower.  I'd also expect that the
physical disk access would be so much slower than either that you'd
barely notice the effect of either.

Walt

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