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Test procedure

Repeat five times:

• mount partition
• copy using dd:
• reading from USB and writting to SSD
• reading from SSD and writting to /dev/null
• umount partition

Test setups

• no encryption
• LUKS defaults
• LUKS aes-xts-plain64

Results

Read

algorithm	transfer speed	performance penalty
no encryption	862 MB/s	0%
LUKS default	797 MB/s	7.5%
LUKS aes-xts-plain64	833 MB/s	3.4%

Write

algorithm	transfer speed	performance penalty
no encryption	36.0 MB/s	0%
LUKS default	30.7 MB/s	14.7%
LUKS aes-xts-plain64	30.6 MB/s	15.0%

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Installing Linux on the MBA4,1 is not particularly difficult though the lack of network connectivity (the wireless chipset isn't supported by the default Gentoo Live CD) makes it a tad more challenging.

tl;dr:

• shrink osx partition and create a new one
• boot from usb
  • modifying the image.squashfs to contain the wl kernel module (broadcom-sta) and wpa_supplicant(.conf)
  • recompiling the kernel to include brcsmac (kernel >=3.1)
• prepare grub.conf
• put kernel, initramfs and grub.conf on the EFI system partition
• put image.squashfs on a USB stick

Read the article.