EXT4 Might Work On Transparent Encryption Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 27 March 2014 at 07:45 PM EDT. 12 Comments
LINUX STORAGE
Besides Facebook preparing to roll-out Btrfs deployments and Tux3 could soon be mainlined into the Linux kernel, an encryption feature may be added to the EXT4 file-system.

Prior to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa this week was the Linux Storage Filesystem and MM Summit. I wasn't at that event earlier in the week but it was overheard today at the Collaboration Summit that there's talk of encryption support potentially being added to EXT4. Unfortunately I don't have any other information to share at this time about the EXT4 encryption proposal.

Encryption can be done in conjunction with EXT4 right now using eCryptfs or dm-crypt / LUKS; see The Performance Impact Of Linux Disk Encryption On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for details. Within EXT4 nor any other major Linux file-system is integrated support for transparent encryption. ZFS is one of the major file-systems with such support while EncFS is a FUSE-based encrypted file-system.

When I have any other information on the potential for native EXT4 encryption support I'll pass it along on Phoronix. For those wishing to learn more about Linux disk encryption I would recommend checking out the Arch Linux Wiki.

Talked about also was work on EXT4 and XFS for removing buffer heads from the file-systems. XFS developers are also working on adding persistent memory support to the file-system.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week