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bwalex / tc-play

Free and simple TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt Implementation based on dm-crypt
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
551 stars 56 forks source link

progress report on creating TC volumes #40

Closed ghost closed 11 years ago

ghost commented 11 years ago

Nice work!

A progress report on creating TC volumes would be awesome.

Background story: I tried to create a volume today, and saw one of my CPU cores was max'd out, but the hard drive was mostly idle. So I thought "that doesn't look right, this could take forever" I even tried AES where my PC gets 2.5GB/s with hardware acceleration: same behavior. Now I'm creating the volume over samba from a windows VM. And I see the same behavior. Windows TC says its only running at 13MB/s and there is lots of CPU load. So windows Truecrypt is no quicker, but at least it gives % complete, Speed and ETA. Which is great to know cos I'm only making a 20GB volume. I think its an important feature to know how much time one is in for :)

bwalex commented 11 years ago

On 2013-08-08 12:32, lope wrote:

[...] I tried to create a volume today, and saw one of my CPU cores was max'd out, but the hard drive was mostly idle.

That's pretty much because of the way the volume is wiped. It uses entropy from /dev/urandom, which can be (depending on the system) CPU-bound.

[...] So windows Truecrypt is no quicker, but at least it gives % complete, Speed and ETA. Which is great to know cos I'm only making a 20GB volume. I think its an important feature to know how much time one is in for :)

tcplay does have a status/progress report for the wiping and entropy collection. You just need to send it SIGINFO (if your system has SIGINFO) or SIGUSR1; e.g. the following should do the trick:

 killall -s USR1 tcplay

Cheers, Alex

ghost commented 11 years ago

Oh thats cool. I was starting to wonder if LVM is really slow. First time I've ever used LVM. Just a simple volume on one of my partitions. No raid or anything. Cool I'll try that command next time :)

ghost commented 11 years ago

Since tcplay volume creation is interactive (it asks for password etc) maybe you should consider asking if the user wants status updates during the volume creation, or suggest the killall command to them. That killall command is not in the man page.

Cheers man

bwalex commented 11 years ago

Didn't realize it wasn't in the man page - I'll definitely update it, then.

Thanks!

r3cgm commented 10 years ago

Could we please have this feature included as a command-line option instead of having to trigger it via a process SIG?