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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.

10 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Something to look forward to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    In RHEL 9

  2. Please fix slashdot by buck-yar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Read More button gone. Stupid share button in its place.

    1. Re:Please fix slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Good to know I'm not the only one bugged by that, not to mention the stupid "video clips" thing they've added.

      Seems like they gave up on beta but are now messing with the "classic" site.

    2. Re:Please fix slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, they are re-implementing beta one step at a time. It's a new strategy.

    3. Re:Please fix slashdot by nine-times · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm suspicious that it was done intentionally, to prod us into posting links on social media and driving more traffic to the site. And why would I want to link my social media sites to Slashdot? I'd want to link directly to the article anyway.

    4. Re:Please fix slashdot by caseih · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes it still works, but it's not obvious or discoverable. And it's jarring. I typically read the blurb to decide if it's interesting, then click the read more at the bottom of the blurb to read the whole thing and the comments. Also the number of comments was right there at the bottom too, which made it nice and fast to see what were the interesting stories. Now that information is in the upper right-hand corner, so I just don't notice it straight away. I guess Dice once again has forgotten the value of slashdot and the interesting aspect of slashdot is the user-generated comments. Dice seems to be rolling out the beta site with all its crap and and its de-emphasis on user-provided content, but under the guise of the classic site. Not working guys!

      If someone can post some greasemonkey scripts to fix the site, that'd be wonderful. Also if we could just turn off the video bytes stuff that would be good also. And put the polls back where they belong!

      In the meantime, there is soylent. It's not been very good lately but if enough people go there and comment, and submit stories, maybe it will get better and be a proper replacement.

  3. 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.

    --
    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
    1. 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.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  4. There are a lot of systemd-free options out there by FreeUser · · Score: 3, Informative

    Which distro are you using that isn't already infected by systemd? I'm SO glad Gentoo still allows me to use OpenRC...

    Me too! I use both funtoo and gentoo, at work and at home, but here's a pretty good sized list of options for those who like debian, arch, and other distributions:

    http://without-systemd.org/wik...

    If you're stuck with Red Hat, your choices have been pretty much taken from you, and you should probably be looking to change to something else, but otherwise you probably have the choice of using OpenRC or upstart, and someone has probably already figured out how for you.

    --
    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
  5. 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.