Re: [gentoo-user] Is there a way to misconfigure USB ports in the kernel?

[Dr Rainer Woitok <rainer.woitok@gmail.com>]

On Saturday, 2020-12-05 19:07:51 +0100, I myself wrote:

("> >" refers to Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com>)

> Michael,
> 
> On Friday, 2020-11-27 19:07:17 +0000, you wrote:
> 
> > ...
> > A 4k block size is recommended for ntfs-3g which is the default sector created 
> > by fdisk and friends on Linux these days.  This will align your partition 
> > optimally.  In addition, mkfs.ntfs will use 4096 bytes as the default cluster 
> > size, so you should be good in that respect.
> > 
> > Another setting you may want to try is mounting the USB with 'big_writes' - 
> > check the man page.  This should help particularly with large files, which 
> > will use larger blocks up to 128KB when copying data to the NTFS.
> 
> Both, the VeraCrypt command line (--fs-options=big_writes) and the Vera-
> Crypt GUI  (under "Settings  --> Preferences")  allow setting this mount
> option.  But
> 
>    $ mount | grep veracrypt
> 
> never shows it,  initially causing me  to erroneously believe  it wasn't
> set and to try finding  on the web another way  of setting it.   By pure
> chance I finally found out that
> 
>    $ ps -ef | grep veracrypt
> 
> lists a  "/usr/sbin/mount.ntfs" task  which shows the  options really in
> effect.  However,  I haven't yet had the time to test the effect of this
> option when writing  plenty of really big files.   I will report on that
> later.

Well,  it's been quite a while,  due to my being almost permanently con-
fronted with more pressing tasks ... :-(

To sum up my experience with my new 128 GB Philips USB 3.0 sticks: while
the Philips sticks  are significantly faster for reading operations than
my old 64 GB Verbatim ones (probably USB 2.0), writing operations to the
Philips sticks  are unbearably slow,  regardless of whether  I created a
normal unencrypted NTFS filesystem on them or an encrypted NTFS filesys-
tem using VeraCrypt.   Writing to  the USB stick  while at the same time
reading from it in a different terminal window caused commands like "cd"
or "ls" to simply stall.  Thus while running

   $ cp --preserve=timestamps -ru $source_dir .

in one terminal window, I ran

   $ while true
   > do n=$(ps -ef|g 'cp --preserve'|g -v grep)
   >    if [[ "$n" = "${o-}" ]]
   >    then sleep 10
   >    else o="$n"
   >         echo "$n"
   >    fi
   > done

in another, to get the  wall clock times  when copying a new file began.
That way I found that copying a 30 MB file took about 40 minutes.

So what are my options?

   - Stay away from Philips USB 3.0 sticks?

   - Stay away from Philips USB sticks in general?

   - Stay away from USB 3.0 sticks in general?

   - Stay away from Filesystem in User Space  using a non-stable 5.10 or
     5.11 kernel (currently I'm using stable 5.4.97)?

   - Stay away from Gentoo?

   - Stay away from Linux in general  and go back to OTOS  (aka the Only
     True Operating System aka Windoze)?

   - ...?

Any ideas and comments welcome ...

Sincerely,
  Rainer