Arch Linux

Lockheed

Member

Registered: 2010-03-16

Posts: 1,550

dmcrypt support for OPAL drives

Does this mean that using LUKS on OPAL NVMe (I don't mean BIOS HDD password) will offload all en/decryption computing to NVMe hardware, hence removing the penalty on CPU and enable LUKS to reach full PCI4.0 NVMe speeds?

Last edited by Lockheed (2023-11-14 09:39:56)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,877

Re: dmcrypt support for OPAL drives

If you use cryptsetup with that merge  included which is not yet part of any release and you follow the instructions to use the experimental OPAL support then encryption/decryption will be performed by the device not the kernel.

Lockheed

Member

Registered: 2010-03-16

Posts: 1,550

Re: dmcrypt support for OPAL drives

Which, if I understand correctly, means "YES".
Thanks!

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,877

Re: dmcrypt support for OPAL drives

If you use cryptsetup with that merge  included which is not yet part of any release

Which, if I understand correctly, means "YES".

So YES if you are building from a git checkout of cryptsetup rather than the package supplied by Arch and not using linux-lts and  using --hw-opal not --hw-opal-only as that does not use dmcrypt.  This is also based on the assumption the CPU is a bottle neck.

Lockheed

Member

Registered: 2010-03-16

Posts: 1,550

Re: dmcrypt support for OPAL drives

Well, I am thinking from a perspective of few months into the future. When do you suppose we can expect the release of dmcrypt supporting that?