EXT4 fscrypt vs. eCryptfs vs. LUKS dm-crypt Benchmarks

Written by Michael Larabel in Storage on 17 June 2018 at 07:42 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 7 Comments.

Given the recent advancements of the EXT4 file-system with its native file-system encryption support provided by the fscrypt framework, here are benchmarks comparing the performance of an EXT4 file-system with no encryption, fscrypt-based encryption, eCryptfs-based encryption, and a LUKS dm-crypt encrypted volume.

For those wondering how these different file-system encryption options compare for performance, I ran some fresh benchmarks using a Linux 4.18 development kernel as of 14 June from the Linux Git tree. The options tested were EXT4, fscrypt, eCryptfs, and LUKS dm-crypt encryption with the EXT4 file-system and tested with the defaults unless otherwise noted. A Toshiba TR150 SATA 3.0 SSD was used as the drive under test for all of the benchmarking. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was the basis for this benchmarking aside from the Linux kernel upgrade.

All of thes Linux file-system encryption benchmarks were carried out in a standardized and fully reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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