Subject: Re: Asynchronous crypto layer.

From: Michal Ludvig <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 16:03:06 +0200

Evgeniy Polyakov told me that:
> On 29 Oct 2004 08:42:18 -0400
> jamal <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>>>I am very curious if you see perfomance improvements over old scheme
>>in the case of a single crypto chip in a fast CPU.
>>It has been shown in the past that with a xeon in the range of 2Ghz the
>>context setup and the big lock (and lack of async) implied that
>>performance enhancement using a crypto chip was negligible.
>>IIRC, the only time it started showing anything useful was when a
>>compute intensive alg like 3DES was chewing packets >= 1000 bytes.
>>
>>My suspicion is you will show it is better to use a crypto chip with
>>async;-> In the minimal you should show some improvement.
> 
> 
> If we have a hardware accelerator chip, than we _already_ have improvements 
> with even the worst async crypto layer, since software and hardware 
> will work in parrallel.
> I agree that multigigahertz box will beat my HIFN card, 
> but I doubt it can beat 1gghz VIA.

I have a very preliminary driver for FastCrypt PCI board for 3DES at
http://www.logix.cz/michal/devel/fcrypt/
For now it works with some very ugly hacks in the current cryptoapi, but
I can give it a try with your acrypto and report the results.

I admit I haven't read your sources too deeply yet so excuse me a dumb
question - does acrypto replace or extend cryptoapi? Once I get it
running will it take over e.g. encryption for IPsec?

Michal Ludvig
-- 
* A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in.
* Personal homepage - http://www.logix.cz/michal