All of lore.kernel.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: Alasdair Kergon <agk@redhat.com>, Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Cc: "dm-devel@redhat.com" <dm-devel@redhat.com>,
	Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Subject: Can we please make 'allow_discards' the default for dm-crypt?
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:10:42 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CA+55aFwEDs26shapevLziT+BPwvHgqOyikCaGcKsNHQLAw6oSw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

I really detest our current dm-crypt policy of not allowing discard by default.

It has this silly "but but security" reason behind it, but let's face
it: if you don't want to do discards for security reasons, then JUST
DON'T DO THEM. Or add a "no_discards" option.

Because right now, the default behavior is wrong. It's geared toward
the 0.1% crazy-anal people, and making a *default* option for those
people is just silly. The whole argument that "you can see access
patterns and how much free space there is" is just complete bullshit.
It's not what any sane person would care about.

The rest of us just want to encrypt our data on our laptops in case
they get stolen, and we don't want to not be able to do the occasional
"fstrim".

Yes, good flash doesn't need trimming all that much, but it won't
hurt. And right now we penalize people who want to do the sane good
thing.

Sure, we could say that distros should just add the "allow_discard"
flag instead, and maybe have a checkbox to say "are you a crazy anal
person" along with the "encrypt disk" checkbox. But EVEN IF the distro
were to do that, that doesn't mean that the kernel default should be
the wrong way around.

Comments?

               Linus

             reply	other threads:[~2016-09-14  2:10 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2016-09-14  2:10 Linus Torvalds [this message]
2016-09-14  7:06 ` Can we please make 'allow_discards' the default for dm-crypt? Milan Broz
2016-09-14 15:41   ` Linus Torvalds
2016-09-14 16:16     ` Mike Snitzer
2016-09-14 16:44     ` Milan Broz

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=CA+55aFwEDs26shapevLziT+BPwvHgqOyikCaGcKsNHQLAw6oSw@mail.gmail.com \
    --to=torvalds@linux-foundation.org \
    --cc=agk@redhat.com \
    --cc=dm-devel@redhat.com \
    --cc=herbert@gondor.apana.org.au \
    --cc=snitzer@redhat.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.