AES-NI (EN)

Architecture

AES-NI (Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions) is a CPU instruction set that enables hardware-accelerated AES encryption and can significantly improve the performance of encrypted systems. Modern processors with this support can perform encryption and decryption operations directly in hardware, rather than simulating these tasks through CPU emulation. The use of AES-NI leads to a significant reduction in CPU load and an increase in throughput rates for encryption. For maximum performance with LUKS encryption, the use of this CPU support with the cipher mode aes-xts-plain64 is recommended.

Data Flow

flowchart TD     A[Application] --> B[CPU without AES-NI]     A --> C[CPU with AES-NI]     B --> D[Software emulation
high CPU load
low throughput]     C --> E[Hardware acceleration
low CPU load
high throughput]     D --> F[Encrypted data]     E --> F