crypto accelerators

[Bruce M Simpson]

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