Ask HN: Does full disk encryption impact functionality of a developer machine?
I am interested in learning about any practical experiences, for example, certain programs no longer working or reduced performance.
I see the use of Full Disk Encryption as being akin the problems faced by users when their disks are encrypted by Ransomware Hackers.
Do we really need Security by Obfuscation for 99.999% of machines? How many of us really need our disk drives to be encrypted?
I have looked at this question often. My verdict is that the potential problems of My Own Access to My Own Data and being locked out of it due to Full Disk Encryption are more of a pain than the minute possibility that some nasty 'other' person might make off with my data.
I am assuming Linux. Some of this is also true for Mac.
Reduced performance, battery life for sure. If one has enough ram they can work around this by doing builds in a ram disk e.g. /dev/shm and then committing artifacts to the encrypted disk. Along that same line, if one is using tmpfs such as /dev/shm to do ephemeral work in ram then be sure that swap is either encrypted or disabled as tmpfs is swap-backed and one could leak sensitive information into unencrypted swap. MacOS by default does not or did not have a ram disk but you can manually mount one.
Performance impact can be somewhat mitigated by ensuring the encryption used is AES and that the CPU supports the AES-NI instruction set and a modern kernel is being used. Really old kernels had a single encryption write thread.
lscpu | grep --color -i aes # or
grep --color -i aes /proc/cpuinfo