Ubuntu 13.10 Linux Disk Encryption Performance

It's been a while since last running any Ubuntu Linux disk encryption benchmarks either of the eCryptfs-based home directory encryption feature or the LUKS-based encrypted LVM, both of which are supported by Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer. With having around the System76 Gazelle Professional laptop and its nice Core i7 4900MQ "Haswell" CPU with Intel 520 SSD, and I'm always one to encourage encrypted disks especially for mobile systems, here are some new benchmarks of Ubuntu 13.10 with no disk encryption versus home directory encryption versus a fully encrypted LVM of the root EXT4 file-system.

All testing was done from the Intel Haswell i7-4900MQ laptop with Intel SSD and Xubuntu Linux was reformatted each time between the encrypted setups. All of the same software packages were in use including the Linux 3.11 kernel and EXT4 file-system with its stock mount options. The tests are very straightforward and all disk focused to see the overhead of using eCyptfs/LUKS for encrypting your disk's contents. The Ubuntu installer makes it very easy to setup either disk encryption method.

Benchmarking the Intel Linux laptop in the three encrypted disk scenarios were handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite platform in conjunction with OpenBenchmarking.org.