Experimental Patches Updated Working On FSCRYPT Encryption For Btrfs

While the Btrfs file-system has many advanced features like transparent file-system compression and built-in RAID, at the moment it lacks native file-system encryption. Fortunately, there are patches that continue to be worked on that aim to provide such functionality.

Btrfs can run off a dm-crypt/LUKS encrypted partition or with eCryptfs, but finally there is progress being made on the native encryption front by leveraging FSCRYPT. EXT4, F2FS, and other file-systems already support using this file-system encryption framework and a set of "request for comments" patches have been updated with FSCRYPT for Btrfs.

Sent out on Saturday were a draft set of changes working on FSCRYPT integration for Btrfs, building off work that has been happening since last year.

The developer noted with the "RFC v2" state, "This series starts implementing it on the kernel side for the simple
case, non-compressed data extents. My goal in sending out this RFC is to get feedback on whether these are going in a reasonable direction; while there are a couple of additional parts, they're fundamentally minor compared to this. Not included are a couple of minor changes to btrfs-progs; additionally, none of the fscrypt tool changes needed to use the new encryption policy are included. Obviously, additional fstests will be needed. Also not yet included are encryption for inline data extents, verity items, and compressed data."

Those wishing to check in on the current state of Btrfs FSCRYPT integration can see the kernel mailing list series for this initial work in the direction of native encryption support for the Btrfs file-system.