Disk Encryption Tests On Fedora 21

If you've been wondering about the impact of enabling full-disk encryption when doing a fresh install of Fedora 21, here's some reference benchmarks comparing the Anaconda option of this latest Fedora Linux release.

During the installation of any release of Fedora in the past number of years has been an "encrypt system" option when setting up the disk(s) via Anaconda. The encrypt system option for Fedora sets up an encrypted LVM using LUKS. It's very easy for those wishing to setup a fully-encrypted disk when installing Fedora.

It's been a while since last running any Fedora/Linux encryption disk benchmarks, so with the latest Fedora 21 release I decided to run some fresh tests from a IvyBridge-based Intel ultrabook. On the same Intel Core i7 system I did a clean install of Fedora 21 followed by doing another installation with the same settings but now opting to encrypt the system.

The ASUS Zenbook UX32VDA ultrabook with Intel Core i7 3517U processor was used for all of the testing with a 128GB SanDisk SD5SF212 solid-state drive. Fedora 21 was running on the system with the Linux 3.17.4 kernel and EXT4 file-system with default mount options. Along with the disk benchmarks ran via the Phoronix Test Suite, the CPU usage was also monitored by setting the MONITOR=cpu.usage environment variable for the Phoronix Test Suite.