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Linux 4.1 Kernel Released With EXT4 Encryption, Performance Improvements

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.1 kernel has been announced and its release brings expanded features for the Linux kernel including EXT4 file-system encryption, open-source GeForce GTX 750 support, performance improvements for Intel Atom / Bay Trail hardware, RAID 5/6 improvements, and other additions.

5 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of great features and no kdbus by FreeUser · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Building the kernel now.

    Very cook feature list, with arguably the best feature being that they managed to keep kdbus and more systemd nonsense from infecting the kernel code. I'm especially looking forward to trying out ext4 encryption on my laptop.

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    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
    1. Re:Lots of great features and no kdbus by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm not sure what encryption is useful for. If my servers get hacked, they're able to read encrypted files. Malware on my Android device can read my encrypted files as soon as I get the phone properly booted. The laptop niche seems okay, except laptops get hacked just like desktops way more often than they get stolen and offlined.

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    2. Re:Lots of great features and no kdbus by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's certainly useful when you're moving equipment or storage devices. Your complaint would apply to any encrypted storage system that mounted an encrypted file system; Bitlocker, Truecrypt, dmcrypt, etc.

      I work for a company that does a lot of government contract work, and we are contractually bound in almost all cases to story certain kinds of confidential data on encrypted media. When using Linux servers, we usually use dmcrypt, but EXT4 encryption would be a nice option as well.

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  2. Re:Please fix slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's worth noting that there's an interesting comment in the HTML social menu, under the selector "article footer div.grid_10.l":


        <div class="popularity">
            <a href =""><i class="icon-thumbs-up-alt"></i></a>
        </div>
        <div class="popularity">
            <a href =""><i class="icon-thumbs-down-alt"></i></a>
        </div>

    I'm really hoping the next step isn't to enable Reddit/Facebook style "vote up/down" popularity contest bs. This is Slashdot, if we like something, we'll comment on it.

  3. Ext4 encryption... by mlts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ext4 encryption has a lot of promise, and I consider this a big feature. It essentially functions like EncFS/CFS, but instead of being a secondary filesystem accessible via FUSE, it is part of the main filesystem. The closest thing it parallels is AIX's EFS.

    I'm not surprised that Google coded this part. It makes perfect sense for Android. Encryption of /data can be turned on immediately during a device setup without having to worry about block level items, or if the device crashes during the /data encryption process.

    Overall, an add-on which is definitely needed. Since Google mainly uses ext4, this is their best bang for the buck, and I hope the maintainers of other filesystems toss something similar in their code.