Re: ecryptfs is unmaintained and untested

From: John Stultz

Date: Tue Oct 14 2025 - 02:08:10 EST


On Mon, Oct 28, 2024 at 9:33 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2024 at 09:50:37PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 28, 2024, at 15:02, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > >
> > > This comment has been there since June 2021, so I think we can just
> > > delete ecryptfs now?
> >
> > I have no opinion on removing ecryptfs, but I don't how possibly
> > removing it is related to the patch I sent, as far as I can tell
> > it just means it relies on both CONFIG_BLOCK and CONFIG_BUFFER_HEAD
> > then.
> >
> > Is there any indication that the last users that had files on
> > ecryptfs are unable to update their kernels?
>
> Debian is still shipping ecryptfs-utils and is building and including
> the ecryptfs kernel module in their distro kernel.`
>
> So it seems likely that there are probably a non-zero (although
> probably relatively small) number of ecryptfs users out there.

Yeah. Sadly I'm one, as I needed something to migrate off of when
encfs was deprecated.

Is there another soon-to-be-deprecated filesystem to encrypt
directories I should move to? :)

I definitely think we need some loud warnings and Tylers' suggestion
for a read-only grace period would be helpful.

thanks
-john