The Performance Impact Of Linux Disk Encryption On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

When looking at the CPU usage overall for all of the tests, the standard install without any form of disk encryption averaged out to 26% for this Intel Core i7 Ultrabook while in the end for the LUKS on LVM and eCryptfs encryption the cost both averaged out to be about 30~31%.

From these results, I would continue to highly recommend using full-disk encryption via LUKS on LVM as opposed to just the eCryptfs-based home directory solution where the performance actually seemed worse and you're then also not protecting /tmp and other areas of the disk.

Users are welcome to reproduce these results for themselves in an easy to use and fully automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite or for judging the performance impact of other disk workloads on Linux.