Fedora 35 To Automatically Use Optimal Encryption Sector Size For Better I/O Performance

With this autumn's Fedora 35 release there should be better performance out-of-the-box for those employing LUKS/dm-crypt encryption while using 4K sector size based storage.

As it stands now when installing Fedora Linux to a disk and using LUKS encryption, a 512 sector size is being used regardless of the physical sector size of the underlying disk. But now with the latest cryptsetup release is an option to be able to automatically determine the optimal sector size. Fedora 35 is planning to enable that option.

This option and making it the default is arguably long overdue but good to see it finally materialize for benefiting newer storage devices with 4k physical sectors. In turn this help with better I/O performance. In most cases for modern NVMe storage when making use of 4k sectors should be a 2~3% performance improvement.

More details on this planned change for Fedora 35 via this Wiki page and will likely see minimal resistance (or more than likely no resistance) getting approved by FESCo and getting the default change in place especially with just needing to pull in the latest cryptsetup and libblockdev.

Fedora 35 should be released before the end of October.