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Date:      Mon, 25 May 2015 13:41:31 +0200
From:      Christoph Moench-Tegeder <cmt@burggraben.net>
To:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Atom C2758 - loading aesni(4) reduces performance
Message-ID:  <20150525114131.GA1457@elch.exwg.net>
In-Reply-To: <687C0C52-08FA-4234-9A64-527163EED3C8@dragondata.com>
References:  <6BA42026-C785-40B5-B9CF-DD4280693C41@dragondata.com> <20150524224454.GX37063@funkthat.com> <687C0C52-08FA-4234-9A64-527163EED3C8@dragondata.com>

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## Kevin Day (toasty@dragondata.com):

> > If you have cryptodev loaded, this is to be expected as OpenSSL will
> > use /dev/crypto instead of the AES-NI instructions..  Just don't load
> > cryptodev and you'll be fine..
> 
> So to make sure I’m understanding… openssl has native AES-NI support, and
> it also can use /dev/crypto. It’s preferring /dev/crypto, but /dev/crypto
> has much higher overhead?

Yes (I hadn't thought of cryptodev, because "why would one load that
without really special crypto hardware?").
The overhead is obvious - when offloading the crypto operations to
the kernel, the benefit of the kernel/hardware crypto support has
to be better than the penalty of communicating with the kernel; and
as you already have AES-NI support in openssl, there's not that much
chance that the kernel is that much faster than openssl itself.

Regards,
Christoph

-- 
Spare Space



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