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Has support for the Intel AES-NI hardware crypto acceleration been added to Ubuntu (LUKS, kernel, OpenSSL libs, etc)? If so, starting with which version?

Here is a list of Intel processors supporting AES-NI:

More about AES-NI:

I am mostly interested in finding out if this effectively suppresses / diminishes any performance penalties of using full disk encryption in Ubuntu.

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  • Is this still valid with Ubuntu 12.04?
    – freddyb
    Aug 13, 2012 at 13:32

3 Answers 3

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It is supported at least since Karmic Koala on the amd64 architecture and since Natty Narwhal it is supported also on the i386 architecture.

You can find that out by looking at the kernel configuration files found here. Search for the term CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES_NI_INTEL.

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If your root partition is LUKS-encrypted you should add aesni-intel to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules (and run sudo update-initramfs -u -k all afterwards).

Otherwise the module will be loaded too late in the boot process.

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  • Is it necessary to blacklist the default aes module ?
    – daisy
    Apr 24, 2012 at 15:50
  • I don't think that blacklisting is needed, at least not on Oneiric. By default AES is compiled into the kernel on Oneiric (CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES=y), only the NI-extensions are available as modules (CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES_X86_64=m and CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES_NI_INTEL=m).
    – exo_cw
    Apr 25, 2012 at 16:47
  • You'll want to run sudo update-initramfs -u to update all of your existing kernels.
    – earthmeLon
    Jul 21, 2014 at 19:20
  • sudo update-initramfs -u will update your most recent/current kernel. To update this for all, use sudo update-initramfs -uk all.
    – earthmeLon
    Aug 10, 2014 at 18:13
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Block level kernel encryption (dm-crypt) already full supports AES-NI cryptographic acceleration.

File level kernel encryption (eCryptfs) support for AES-NI was recently merged into the Linux upstream kernel tree, and should make its way into the Ubuntu kernel soon. Perhaps 13.10?

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