There may not be an IO performance disadvantage to using Intel AES-NI for dmcrypt, versus in-hardware (in the drive). But there is a CPU performance impact when

There may not be an IO performance disadvantage to using Intel AES-NI for dmcrypt, versus in-hardware (in the drive). But there is a CPU performance impact when using it. I see ~22% x4 thread (~88% CPU out of 400%) for kcryptd processes when fully utilizing reads or writes for a single laptop hard drives at ~140MB/s with an Intel Pentium N3700 in an Intel NUC. That's obviously not a very substantial CPU. But it is nevertheless a fairly substantial CPU hit. The spare CPU cycles are available so it doesn't have an actual impact on this system. Anyway, neither kernel fscrypt, nor dmcrypt have any dependency on drive embedded crypto. They do use AES-NI or equivalent, if available and if that support is compiled into the kernel. Detail output from top while doing a scrub on a LUKS encrypted system. (Expires in 7 days.) https://paste.fedoraproject.org/paste/IvXs0f-N2~qN-k32Z2Y~yA/raw https://paste.fedoraproject.org/paste/IvXs0f-N2~qN-k32Z2Y~yA...