Cryptsetup 2.8 Released With Support For Inline Hardware Metadata Space
Cryptsetup 2.8 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used utility used to setup disk encryption under Linux around the DM-CRYPT kernel functionality for LUKS volumes and more.
Most prominent with Cryptsetup 2.8 is adding support for inline mode for making use of hardware sectors with additional hardware metadata space. This inline mode currently works with select enterprise NVMe SSDs and can be used for overcoming the performance bottleneck of the DM-INTEGRITY journal.
The Cryptsetup 2.8 release notes explain of the new inline mode:
Cryptsetup 2.8 also brings updates around the Keyslot context API use, OPAL2 handling updates and fixes, optimizing LUKS2 metadata writes, and various other fixes and updates. Cryptsetup 2.8 can be downloaded from GitLab.
Most prominent with Cryptsetup 2.8 is adding support for inline mode for making use of hardware sectors with additional hardware metadata space. This inline mode currently works with select enterprise NVMe SSDs and can be used for overcoming the performance bottleneck of the DM-INTEGRITY journal.
The Cryptsetup 2.8 release notes explain of the new inline mode:
"Introduce support for inline mode (use HW sectors with additional hardware metadata space).
Some enterprise NVMe drives allow formatting sector size with additional metadata space, for example, sector size 4096 bytes + 64 bytes for metadata. We hope common firmware will soon support such features in more recent models.
If this metadata space is available (not internally used by a data integrity profile), it removes the need to use the dm-integrity layer for sector metadata allocation. This means that the performance bottleneck caused by the dm-integrity journal is eliminated.
Note: such drive must be reformatted with an external nvme tool. You can check for support (reported as LBA format) by running the command "nvme id-ns -H
Cryptsetup 2.8 also brings updates around the Keyslot context API use, OPAL2 handling updates and fixes, optimizing LUKS2 metadata writes, and various other fixes and updates. Cryptsetup 2.8 can be downloaded from GitLab.