Re: Depreciate and remove gbde

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Martin Cracauer <cracauer_at_cons.org> wrote:
> Yonas Yanfa wrote on Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 06:36:19AM -0400:
>>
>> Is there any objection to removing gbde? How many people use gbde? When
>> have you used gbde over geli, and why?
>
> You would exclude all current users from accessing their existing
> filesystems or whatever they put into that block device.
>
> A conversion tool would pretty much be forced to use the current
> kernel layers (doing the block chaining in userspace would be
> annoying), and it would be fundamentally unsafe to have your
> half-converted filesystem on disk in case of an interruption.  Plus I
> think GELI uses a bigger header so you might fall short by a couple of
> bytes and you can't do anything about it on the block level with no
> access to the filesystem.
>
> And people might not have their gbde units accessible right now, it
> might be on a laptop in a closet on a different continent.

For the number of replies Yonas received saying "no, don't do that --
someone might be using it" -- the reason why Yonas asked the question
is valid given the information that was presented.

1. Why are there 2 competing technologies?
2. Is one technologically superior to the other (performance, capability, etc)?
3. Is there a gain/loss for removing gbde?
4. Why is it marked experimental [still]?

Thanks!
-NGie