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What would be the Read-/Write-overhead when using dm-crypt (LUKS) as full disk-encryption (including root partition) on a Linux-Desktop (Ubuntu)? I plan to stack it like so: LUKS > LVM > ext4 The CPU in use on the system would be a Core2 Duo 2.1 GHz with 4GB of RAM.

  • Would encryption of such a system create a great/noticeable overhead?
  • Are there any recent benchmarks to be found on the net? What is your personal experience?
  • Are there any settings I can make to improve performance?

Thx for your help.

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There is no I/O-overhead involved in dm-crypt - just CPU overhead ... ;)

On a Athlon 64 2.6 GHz dual core system for example I can copy from one dm-crypt disk to another with ~ 40 MB/sec (2.6.26 Kernel, Seagate 1.5 TB SATA disks).

For performance make sure that the for your architecture optimized aes module is loaded, e.g.

$ lsmod | grep aes
aes_x86_64             12416  6 
aes_generic            32552  1 aes_x86_64

Regarding data-safety, there is no need to disable the write-cache because of dm-crypt. Old versions didn't support write-barriers, but since 2010 (kernel 2.6.31 or so) dm-crypt does support them (respectively force-unit-access - FUA).

Btw, one can argue that it does not really makes sense to encrypt the root-partition.

However, encrypting swap does make sense.

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    One might argue as well that messing around with hdparm when you don't know what you're doing (or only think you know) can damage your hard drives. – amphetamachine Feb 24 '12 at 23:30
  • Encrypting the root partition makes sense if your threat model includes the possibility of an adversary gaining temporary physical access and booting in single user mode or from a USB drive and installing malware such as a key-logger or rootkit. For regular users, it also means not having to worry about forgetting to encrypt /tmp (if it's not mounted with `tmpfs) and any other directories that might leak private data. – Anthony Geoghegan Oct 11 '16 at 10:30
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    @AnthonyGeoghegan, this is perhaps effective against some adversaries. But to protect against the threat model you describe you also have to secure the bootloader (e.g. with a firmware that cryptographically checks the bootloader before executing it). – maxschlepzig Oct 11 '16 at 19:01
  • @maxschlepzig That very thought occured to me as I wrote the comment earlier but I didn't want to go overboard with disclaimers and provisos in a small comment box. The second reason is probably more important: I use FDE (on my 10 year old laptop) so I don't have to worry (as much) about credentials and private keys in /etc or some other sensitive data somehow being logged to /var/ (upvoted, BTW). – Anthony Geoghegan Oct 11 '16 at 21:05
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Ext4 may be a bad choice of filesystem if you are planning on performing LVM snapshots. I would advise doing substantial disk performance checking before going live, experiementing with block sizes on both FS and LVM. My experience was with Ext3, but the other articles I saw at the time implied that Ext4 had simular problems.

I solved it by using XFS as the filesystem.

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