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Date:      Thu, 13 Mar 2014 09:35:26 -0700
From:      John-Mark Gurney <jmg@funkthat.com>
To:        Riccardo Veraldi <riccardo.veraldi@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-sparc64 <freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: SSL acceleration cards
Message-ID:  <20140313163526.GJ32089@funkthat.com>
In-Reply-To: <53217D98.3040408@gmail.com>
References:  <53217D98.3040408@gmail.com>

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Riccardo Veraldi wrote this message on Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 10:42 +0100:
> I have a Sun Blade system with FreeBSD 9.2
> I would like to ask which SSL acceleration card is well supported in 
> particular for sparc64 platform.
> Any of the one dor x86 will work also on sparc64 ?
> anyone uses that on sparc64 platforms ?

I don't know of any modern crypto acceleration card that is supported
by FreeBSD...  There are many old ones, like the hifn, but when I
was researching them a while back, the performance was so slow that
you might as well do software crypto...

The other one is Broadcom's (ubsec(4)) but the faster card only runs at
1Gbit/s and no support for AES-GCM (though we don't have AES-GCM support
in the tree, so it wouldn't help anyways)...

I'm not sure if anyone has ever tried to run these cards in a non-x86
machine...  There could be endian issues w/ the drivers....

When trying to purchase these cards, either I couldn't find a supplier,
or the price was so high, it'd be cheaper to buy a whole new system w/
a modern amd64 processor that has AES-NI to do it...  Even some sub-$150
CPUs support AES-NI which can give you 2GBbytes/s per core AES-XTS
(sans geli overhead)...  I did most of my AES-NI work on an AMD
A10-5700...  Though FreeBSD 9.2 doesn't have all the latest AES-NI
improvements, nor does 9-stable, so AES-NI is only marginally faster
than software crypto in 9.x...

There are some modern cards out there, but no one has written drivers
out there, or the vendors are not supporting writing drivers for
them...

What is your use case that you are looking to use the card for?

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."



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