On 01/08/2022 23:00, Wojciech Zabołotny wrote:
Probably the number of affected people is quite big, but they have
simply accepted this situation.

This is much more complicated. The problem with the "freezing" system while 
writing to a dm-crypt device (whatever type) is not new, but also it is not one problem.
I know about several issues that caused this, and most of them should be fixed. 
Some are related to specific HW only.

Please do not mix observation now and years ago - always use a new kernel, and 
always describe what you see *now*.
The dm-crypt was several times heavily optimized for parallel processing, and 
each change usually caused another problem in some other specific situation :-)
If you can reproduce it reliably with new upstream kernel, please report it to 
the dm-devel list.

Just in short, what I know:

1) there was a problem that dm-crypt allocated too much IO in progress (and memory), and 
flushing the device causes "freezes" or OOM.
This should be fixed (in 2018) in recent kernels, and dm-crypt internally 
limits maximal allocated memory.

2) I remember that on AMD CPUs was a problem with the queue handling; the 
workaround was using that dm-crypt performance option.
(IIRC, nobody from DM devels was able to reproduce it, not sure if because of 
lack of HW or other reasons.)

3) External drives connected through USB cause problems, but this happens even 
without dm-crypt - encryption only worsens it.
It is a problem how USB handles storage devices; I do not think the problem is 
in dm-crypt itself.


There were a lot of problems with crypto algorithm drivers allocating memory on 
the hot path (these should not be used by dm-crypt anymore) or bad 
implementations (notable QAT driver that only recently was fixed).

Setting blocks device scheduler (CFQ, none) has also had an impact here.
Rotational drives behave completely differently from SSD and NVME.
...

TLDR: Reproducing issues is usually very complicated, usually it is something 
specific specific for your system - if you can help, please send report to 
dm-devel list.

Cryptsetup cannot "optimize" any performance flags to use, this would fix one 
issue and cause many others.

Milan

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