Ubuntu Security :: Ext3/ext4 Full Disc Encryption Performance?
Feb 3, 2010
I've been using full disk encryption with luks on two Dell laptops for about 2.5 years. One is 64 bit Fedora (upgraded to 12), another is 32 bit Ubuntu (upgraded to 9.10), both were ext3, until recently.Over time, performance degraded substantially, especially on Fedora, which was put to a heavier use. That laptop has 4 Gb RAM, two 2.5 GHz T9300 CPUs, and 56 Gb of free space.
It was especially unbearable after a reboot. Programs like firefox and thunderbird would take close to a minute to start when ran for the first time after a boot. The login process was painfully slow, and some Gnome applets (e.g. Tomboy notes, keyboard layout switcher) would fail to load on the first login, with an error. I experienced this problem on both laptops with full encryption. I had to log out and relogin to make the applets appear. I tried various boot and mount options and was thinking about switching to ecryptfs (encrypted home).
I also use 3 desktops with no encryption and a netbook with ecryptfs on /home, which all work fine. All are Dell, 2 Ubuntu and 2 Fedora. The Gnome applets problem seems to be due to slowness of the installs with the full disk encryption. The last thing I tried is to migrate ext3 to ext4. I also converted /home, /usr, /opt to extents, following[URL].. That seemed to do the trick. Gnome applets now load fine on both laptops, and startup time is back to tolerable.
Is this a typical experience: ext3 performance degradation with time and a much better performance with full disk encryption once ext3 is migrated to ext4?
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Dec 29, 2009
How can I format a USB hard drive to ext3/ext4 or whatever file format and have full permission to read, write and execute all files afterwards? When using the command line (as ROOT of course) mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb? Restricts the rights to ROOT as does the procedure gParted. The man mkfs did not help much. Configuring the fstab- file is a bit of a hassle, so it would be nice, if there was an option to set the permissions "correctly" right from the beginning. Setting Ubuntu (I'm using Ubuntu 9.10) up, so that it mounts USB devices not as ROOT as default but giving all users all permissions seems to be really complicated, as a guy from my local LUG told me.
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Aug 25, 2010
Is it possible to encrypt the entire drive and not be prompted for the passphrase?
I have a request for a demo of our application and I am looking to create a virtual for VMware's player but need to make sure that the vmdk file cannot be mounted and files pulled from it to protect us from reverse engineering of the application.
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Oct 20, 2010
For some reason I can't find any documentation re: the algorithm(s) used by Ubuntu to encrypt the filesystem... Anyone know what it is?? AES?
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Apr 13, 2011
Is there a way to install ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 with full disk encryption? I read how to do it in the 8.0 version, was wondering if it is still possible?
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Nov 14, 2010
I do know about cold boot attacks. But I ran across a couple of posts/websites that had me wonder if it is possible, without the passphrase, to just remove the encryption?
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Jan 6, 2011
I want encrypt my fedora file system.
How to i can encrypt ext3 or ext4 file system.
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Jan 13, 2010
this isn't really a security question, per se, so feel free to move. It is related to full disk LVM encryption though. Full disk didn't work for me with grub2 after running dd to a remote server, so I downgraded to grub1. No biggie. However, I have neither grub or grub2 as selected in Synaptic.Let's say I forget which I have installed. How would I determine what version of grub is installed at the moment. I'm assuming it's somehow installed on in the mbr but not on the OS. I didn't mean to do anything funky. Is that the normal setup? I'm deploying these systems to users and want to be able to troubleshoot issues in the future (hopefully that will not be needed!) grub --version does not work because it is not installed.
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May 19, 2010
I had 5.4 machine. Upgraded to 5.5 today via yum upgrade. All went fine. Rebooted. Wanted to convert root partition to ext4 (I have three partitions: /boot, / and swap). All of them on software RAID 1 (root is /dev/md2). I did the following for converting
yum install e4fsprogs
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/md2
nano /etc/fstab # I indicated here that my /dev/md2 is of ext4
[code]....
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Jan 29, 2010
how much of a performance impact full disk encryption (say, AES 256-bit) has on disk-related activities? On one particular project I'm involved in I am trying to weigh out security vs performance issues.
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Nov 15, 2010
i installed ubuntu 10.04 and accidentally choosen ext3 over my home partition ext4...and now it erased(?) all the files in my home folder...
is there a way to return the ext4 files??
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Apr 30, 2010
I run an upgrade and an update on a lucid lynx beta 2. --- got no problems. but about the filesystems i have some questions because it seems for me that at every system boot the system will run an fsck. somtimes it's shown up, somtimes not. but in /var/log/messages and in syslog
I have always following messages ( occured in beta 2 too ).
But first before i continue - here my disk layout:
And here my filesystem types:
This is my problem because those values are seems to be static ! ( note: this partiton is mounted but not in use ) and last not least: the drive is an external usb scsi disk. but on the other side lucid lynx is running fine on my box.
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Sep 7, 2010
I am going to do network upgrade of my 8.04 to 10.04 LTS. I have a dual boot with Vista, and currently I can read Ubuntu partition from Vista using Ext2fsd. However, I read that using Ext2fsd with ext4 (default in 10.04) is problematic because of "extents".
My questions: Will the upgrade convert my current ext3 partition into an ext4 one? How can I keep the ext3 partition? The release notes for 10.04 say:
The simplest way to select a different file system such as ext3 at installation time is to add the partman/default_filesystem=ext3 boot parameter when starting the installer.
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Aug 31, 2010
I have a drive with ext3 that was my old /home drive.When I moved to 9.04 I went with ext4 and just linked to my old home drive.My old ext3 drive is becoming unstable so I want to back it up.I have a 500gb ata drive (unfortunately not a sata drive) thatto wipe and put 10.04 on. I want to move my data from this backup driveIm going to back up to, to the new 10.04 until I get another hd as abackup drive.My question is, I know there is some issue between ext3 and 4 and I dontwant to get into a bind. What would be the best format for moving
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Jul 3, 2011
I have set up a Linux software RAID5 on three hard drives and want to encrypt it with cryptsetup/LUKS. My tests showed that the encryption leads to a massive performance decrease that I cannot explain. The RAID5 is able to write 187 MB/s [1] without encryption. With encryption on top of it, write speed is down to about 40 MB/s.
The RAID has a chunk size of 512K and a write intent bitmap. I used -c aes-xts-plain -s 512 --align-payload=2048 as the parameters for cryptsetup luksFormat, so the payload should be aligned to 2048 blocks of 512 bytes (i.e., 1MB). cryptsetup luksDump shows a payload offset of 4096. So I think the alignment is correct and fits to the RAID chunk size.
The CPU is not the bottleneck, as it has hardware support for AES (aesni_intel). If I write on another drive (an SSD with LVM) that is also encrypted, I do have a write speed of 150 MB/s. top shows that the CPU usage is indeed very low, only the RAID5 xor takes 14%.
I also tried putting a filesystem (ext4) directly on the unencrypted RAID so see if the layering is problem. The filesystem decreases the performance a little bit as expected, but by far not that much (write speed varying, but > 100 MB/s).
Summary:
Disks + RAID5: good
Disks + RAID5 + ext4: good
Disks + RAID5 + encryption: bad
SSD + encryption + LVM + ext4: good
The read performance is not affected by the encryption, it is 207 MB/s without and 205 MB/s with encryption (also showing that CPU power is not the problem). What can I do to improve the write performance of the encrypted RAID?
[1] All speed measurements were done with several runs of dd if=/dev/zero of=DEV bs=100M count=100 (i.e., writing 10G in blocks of 100M).
Edit: If this helps: I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 64bit with Linux 2.6.38. Edit2: The performance stays approximately the same if I pass a block size of 4KB, 1MB or 10MB to dd.
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Jan 16, 2010
Is there guide for converting ext3 to ext4 on Fedora? I use Fedora 12 which is regularly updated. How safe is procedure for data, I have only one ext3 partition on disk which has one ntfs and that ext3 partition (and also one small swap partition).
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May 25, 2010
I'm currently using Ubuntu, but just ordered a new SSD (64GB) & plan to install Fedora on it- but just have a few questions...
- What is Fedora's position on MONO & MoonLight?
- I will be leaving /home on my 600+ BGB HDD, but root, /usr & swap will be on my SSD- will there be any potential issues?
- What format should I use (Ext3, Ext4, XFS...) for my SSD?
- Any recommendation of rpm repo's I should add?
- Will FGLRX work with FC13 or FC12
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May 17, 2010
I had Lenny with ext3 installed on my notebook. I've done the Upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze. Howto and should I convert ext3 to ext4?
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Mar 9, 2010
how to convert ext3 to ext4? I'd like to convert partitions which I use for virtual machines (vmware-server and virtualbox). I use Ubuntu 9.10 as vmware-server host and Gentoo as virtualbox host.
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Dec 10, 2010
I have a 6 disk machine, i am using FC12, i created a software raid 5 device /dev/md1
i formatted it
Code:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/md1
and mounted with options as so:
[Code]...
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Oct 5, 2010
I'm using CentOs 5.4 (2.6.18-164.15.1.el5 #1 SMP Wed Mar 17 11:30:06 EDT 2010 x86_64). I tested out ext4 on a partition for the last few months and it seems to work fine. The issue is that quotas dont seem to work correctly on it. Is there a way to revert back to ext3? Mainly the quota tools do not work on it.
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Nov 18, 2010
I've recently installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a machine, unfortunately, the hard drive was ext3 partitioned. Is there a way of converting this partition to ext4 without having to re-format and hence reinstall the entire OS ?
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Jul 24, 2011
I need to convert my server(10.04) to ext4 from ext3 and want to make sure I am going to do this the correct way.
Edit fstab to ext4
Code:
sed -i s/ext3/ext4/ /etc/fstab
Run the tune2fs command, the filesystem is mounted is this ok?
Code:
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/md0
[Code].....
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Dec 31, 2010
The ext4 features are well listed in the Ext4 Howto.
Most of these features seem to be aimed at newer systems, having petabytes disk drives and handling huge files -- neither of which applies to my system.
Can a modest 3 year old system, having only two 500GB HDDs, used mostly for Android development using Eclipse (64-bit), benefit from choosing ext4 over ext3?
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Feb 26, 2011
I've heard that ext4 has better performance, but that it will also eat my hard drive. Has this problem been fixed? What would be a safer bet on a squeeze box? Is there even anything to worry about?
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May 21, 2010
I've Squeeze installed on ext3 (Upgrade from Lenny). Howto convert ext3 to ext4?
BTW What are advantages & disadvantages of ext4?
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Mar 21, 2010
The laptop I regularly use is out of use after having tried to upgrade from ext3 to ext4, following the instructions that can be found at namely, Step 2: Upgrading to Ext4Well, the first step was done without problems, but when I reached "Mount your filesystem", the problems started:When typingsudo mount -t ext4 /dev/XXXX /mntwhat appears is:UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLYStupid me, I did nothin but jump to the next step:gksu gedit /mnt/etc/fstabWhere I only got a fully white screen with no written text at all, instead of the menu that should have appeared, as can be seen on that webpage.
However, after running Gparted again, it showed the extension as EXT4, not EXT3, so I thought the system had automatically upgraded. Then I proceeded to boot the system, and this is where the massive failure appearedAfter seeing the Ubuntu logo for a while, the system directs me to a blank screen with the message:Mount of filesystem failed.dc5123-ec01-4438-8bd6-cb85bb080f87A maintenance shell will now be started.CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and re-try.root@hihihi-laptop:#So I type CTRL-D:
mountall start/startingfsck from until-linux-ng 2.16
/dev/sda1: One or more block group descriptor checksums are invalid. FIXED
/dev/sda1: Group descriptor 0 checksum is invalid
[code]....
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Mar 22, 2010
I have been able to get most of the way through the process of changing from using ext4 back to using ext3, but something is not quite right so my system does not boot properly.
I have a system that was running Karmic Koala 9.10 as a server (no graphical environment). I had two drives using RAID1 with LVM on top, where the logical volumes of oldvg (old volume group) were using mostly ext4. /boot was not part of the RAID: it's on a separate physical drive and uses ext2.
I recently added two more drives and used RAID1 and LVM, and made all lv partitions (/, /usr, /var, /tmp, /opt, /home, /srv) ext3. I used rsync to duplicate the contents onto the logical volumes of newvg (new volume group). I was careful with rsync's option switches, and this part seems to be fine.
I also edited (the new) /etc/fstab and changed the UUIDs of the seven mount points to point to the logical volumes that are part of newvg instead of oldvg, and added new entries to (the new) /boot/grub/menu.lst to refer to newvg in addition to those that I left around to refer to oldvg.
This wasn't sufficient: rebooting here failed, but I went in with a rescue disk, and first updated /boot/grub/device.map to include the new physical drives. I then mounted all the new logical volumes, mounted boot also at its proper place, and entered a chroot of the new system as it should be mounted. Once there, (and after making a backup of /boot) I ran "update-initramfs -k all -c" to rebuild the initrd images that were stored on /boot. Finally, I also edited /etc/mtab so that the two entries that referred to oldvg now refer to newvg instead.
Now, the machine begins to boot from newvg, but the console text includes messages like:
And a bit later,
Now, at this shell if I type mount, I see:
I am actually confused as to why there are only entries for /root and /var in /etc/mtab, actually, instead of entries for all of the main mount points. I am thinking it must be part of the boot staging process, because there are entries for newvg-usr, newvg-tmp, etc. in /etc/fstab.
When I type any of pvdisplay, vgdisplay, or lvdisplay, I get
In fact, even if I run lvm, I get a similar error:
However, if I go back to the rescue cd, pvdisplay, vgdisplay, and lvdisplay do show that all of the partitions from both the old and new volume groups are available.
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Apr 13, 2010
I need evaluate the ext3 file system performance; i need define:
- services provided
- parameters and
- the performance with different parameter values; for example, changin the value of the "data" parameter (journal, ordered, writeback).
I do not know what services ext3 provides. Well, i know intuitively that it provides services to read, write and erase files. But, there are anything more?. Where can i find the API?. Is the ext3 file system POSIX compliant?
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Apr 30, 2010
I'm wondering if anyone knows what will be Squeeze's default filesystem. Will it be the proven ext3 or the newer (sometimes faster, sometimes slower) ext4?
I currently have ext4 and I have nothing to complain about. In fact, my overall experience has been very positive. Ext4 is definitely faster when fsck runs during boot.
What would be the cons of having ext4 as default in Squeeze?
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