Re: [Tails-dev] Please review feature/hugetlb_mem_wipe

On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 04:17:45PM +0200, anonym wrote:
> > I experimented with yet another approach to improve the situation of our
> > memory wiping mechanism. Maybe all we needed to fix the current process
> > was 0f1f476d, but well...
> > [...]
>
> I've now benchmarked current devel vs. the feature/hugetlb_mem_wipe
> branch. I was done in a 64-bit VM with 8 GB of RAM. In each test I
> verified that the memory was completely filled with the pattern before
> wiping.

Thanks _a lot_ for your benchmarks.

> > Provided a little more feedback, this could go in 0.14. We can always
> > revert if rc1 proves it deficient.
>
> Given that:
>
> * current devel cleans *all* memory in the most common case (PAE
> kernel), and that it does so without taking very much more time, and
> * I'm unsure what the implications are of hugetlb_mem_wipe exiting with
> that error on a non-PAE kernel,
>
> I'd rather wait with merging feature/hugetlb_mem_wipe until after Tails
> 0.14.

I agree. It looks like `feature/hugetlb_mem_wipe` needs a little bit of
polishing, at least on non-PAE kernels. It also looks like we could tune
the parameters to clean up a little bit more memory.

--
Ague