Intel AES-NI For Ubuntu Home Encryption
The IOzone results also were not greatly different when the aesni-intel kernel module was loaded.
Here is a look at the CPU usage for the Sandy Bridge notebook across the spectrum of tests. The CPU usage with Intel AES-NI support enabled is five percent higher on average, but that's due to the Dbench test taking up the largest amount of time and that's where the aesni-intel module caused the CPU utilization to be elevated by 10% compared to the software-based encryption.
When only having one core enabled and no Hyper Threading for this Intel Sandy Bridge notebook, the results still were not different. The Intel AES-NI support did not dramatically affect the performance of using Ubuntu home encryption, at least for this hardware/software configuration and benchmark workload. In some tests, loading the aesni-intel module even worsened the disk performance, but for the most part the difference was negligible. One item to note with the single core results is that the advantage of AES-NI with the Dbench test profile when having all cores enabled was now erased. The single-core results along side the four thread results can be found in this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.