- The st_size of an encrypted symlink will not necessarily give the
length of the symlink target as required by POSIX. It will actually
- give the length of the ciphertext, which may be slightly longer than
- the plaintext due to the NUL-padding.
+ give the length of the ciphertext, which will be slightly longer
+ than the plaintext due to NUL-padding and an extra 2-byte overhead.
+
+- The maximum length of an encrypted symlink is 2 bytes shorter than
+ the maximum length of an unencrypted symlink. For example, on an
+ EXT4 filesystem with a 4K block size, unencrypted symlinks can be up
+ to 4095 bytes long, while encrypted symlinks can only be up to 4093
+ bytes long (both lengths excluding the terminating null).
Note that mmap *is* supported. This is possible because the pagecache
for an encrypted file contains the plaintext, not the ciphertext.