From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262131AbTLDQKB (ORCPT ); Thu, 4 Dec 2003 11:10:01 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262694AbTLDQKB (ORCPT ); Thu, 4 Dec 2003 11:10:01 -0500 Received: from anchor-post-33.mail.demon.net ([194.217.242.91]:55557 "EHLO anchor-post-33.mail.demon.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262131AbTLDQJ6 (ORCPT ); Thu, 4 Dec 2003 11:09:58 -0500 Message-ID: <3FCF5BB8.50500@lougher.demon.co.uk> Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 16:07:20 +0000 From: Phillip Lougher User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030228 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linus Torvalds , =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=F6rn_Engel?= CC: Kallol Biswas , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, "linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org" Subject: Re: partially encrypted filesystem References: <1070485676.4855.16.camel@nucleon> <20031203214443.GA23693@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> <20031204141725.GC7890@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > Encryption does have a few extra problems, simply because of the intent. > In a compressed filesystem it is ok to say "this information tends to be > small and hard to compress, so let's not" (for example, metadata). While > in an encrypted filesystem you shouldn't skip the "hard" pieces.. Squashfs is I think the only Linux filesystem that does compress the metadata. I did this more as a technical challenge, but the extra compression is sometimes worthwhile, especially with filesystems with lots of small files. Normally, however, it probably isn't worth the effort. Phillip > > (Encrypted filesystems also have the key management issues, further > complicating the thing, but that complication tends to be at a higher > level). > > Linus