ubsec(4) and AES

[Sam Leffler]

Gergely CZUCZY wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 09:38:00AM -0800, Sam Leffler wrote:
>   
>> Gergely CZUCZY wrote:
>>     
>>> Good morning,
>>>
>>> I'd like to ask whether there was any updates, news, anything
>>> about the Broadcom cryptoaccelerators' AES support in the recent
>>> past. ubsec(4)[1] tells at the BUGS section, that it's awaiting
>>> some information from broadcom. It would be nice to have AES
>>> support for these cards, since the hifn(4) ones don't provide
>>> as much performance as the broadcom ones, according to the
>>> utilities in the source tree, google, and the vendors themselves.
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ubsec
>>>  
>>>       
>> Broadcom never gave me the ok to add the AES support; will ask again.
>>
>> As to performance I believe hifn 7956 parts were on a par w/ the 5823 but it's been a long time.  The main issue isn't the speed of the 
>> crypto part but the bus+dma glue.
>>     
> And also stability. I've experience system crashing with the soekris vpn1401. It was
> kinda strange. Existing things worked (like an opened ssh connect, the box is a gateway),
> but I couldn't even fork() new processes, use apache, open new ssh connections to the
> box, anything. And the interrupt load was also a bit too high. Anyways, it's a different
> issue.
>   

Hifn contributed many driver fixes for the 795x parts but some are not 
yet in cvs.  However I recently tested a Hifn reference 7956 card w/ 
HEAD and couldn't make it fail as it used to.  I've requested help 
getting all the hifn changes into the tree but gotten no responses.


> Silicom has drivers for both windows and linux, and they support AES. I wasn't able to
> download the driver (got an empty page), so I don't know whether its opensource or not.
>   
    Sam