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Date:      Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:10:15 +0100
From:      Bruce M Simpson <bms@spc.org>
To:        Dave Cornejo <dave@dogwood.com>
Cc:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: crypto accelerators
Message-ID:  <20060418191015.GE28496@spc.org>
In-Reply-To: <200604180244.k3I2icZj076600@white.dogwood.com>
References:  <200604180244.k3I2icZj076600@white.dogwood.com>

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On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 04:44:38PM -1000, Dave Cornejo wrote:
> So the question is whether these cards, regardless of their affect on
> throughput, increase usable CPU cycles?  I have several Soekris 1401
> cards and am wondering if there would be any point to putting them
> into some machines that provide logins over ssh.  These machines are
> generally pretty good spec, 2.4GHz+, 1GB RAM, Intel MBs, mostly
> on-board peripherals.

Given that spec of machine, I don't see that a hardware cipher would
offer much improvement -- and some of the available crypto accelerators
don't perform Diffie-Helmann or AES, some do.

I myself have a ubsec(4) card, and even when I hacked OpenSSH to use
OpenSSL engine support by default (with someone else's patch), I didn't
see that much improvement (even when I forced the use of MD5, RSA and
3DES).

I could be wrong though - the above is qualitative not quantitative.

Regards,
BMS



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