netdev - Re: RFC: Crypto API User-interface

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Date:	Tue, 7 Sep 2010 16:57:04 +0200
From:	Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav@...tls.org>
To:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>
Cc:	Herbert Xu <herbert@...dor.hengli.com.au>,
	Linux Crypto Mailing List <linux-crypto@...r.kernel.org>,
	netdev@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: RFC: Crypto API User-interface

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org> wrote:
>> This is what I am proposing for the Crypto API user-interface.
>
> Can you explain why we would ever want a userspace interface to it?
>
> doing crypto in kernel for userspace consumers sis simply insane.
> It's computational intensive code which has no business in kernel space
> unless absolutely required (e.g. for kernel consumers).  In addition
> to that adding the context switch overhead and address space transitions
> is god awfull too.
> This all very much sounds like someone had far too much crack.

Or that someone is not really aware of some cryptographic uses.
Embedded systems have crypto accelerators in hardware available
through kernel device drivers. In the systems I worked the
accelerators via a crypto device interface gave a 50x to 100x boost in
crypto operations and relieved the CPU from doing them.

regards,
Nikos
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