-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 11:25:32PM +0200, Alexander S A Kjeldaas wrote: > On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 12:17:17PM -0400, Richard Guy Briggs wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 05:52:04PM +0200, Alexander S A Kjeldaas wrote: > > > I think there are some interesting issues to be solved when we want to > > > get hardware crypto cards running under Linux. For one, we want to > > > have a queue of processing requests for the device instead of having a > > > synchronous interface like most crypto libraries offer. We also > > > probably want to use the CPU if the queue starts to have too many > > > entries, or load-balance between several cards, so we need a > > > "crypto-provider" concept. Also, for programmable crypto-cards we > > > might want to consider the cost of switching ciphers on the card when > > > choosing which requests should be done by which cards/CPU. This will > > > be interesting to look at when the first drivers emerge. > > > > I completely agree that it should be queue-based. SMP is the other > > obvious reason for a queue. > > > > Alan Cox has publicly stated that he thinks this is the right way to > > do things, but at the moment, asynchrony and queues for this type of > > processing will be a big challenge to accomplish this in the present > > Linux kernels. > > Could you expand on some of the issues? Are the problems related to > where you are allowed to sleep in the tcp/ip stack? The part of > creating the async crypto API seems doable. I don't know, I would have to check back with Alan on this one... > astor > > -- > Alexander Kjeldaas Mail: astor@xxxxxxx > finger astor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx for OpenPGP key. > > Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system > Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/ slainte mhath, RGB - -- Richard Guy Briggs -- PGP key available Auto-Free Ottawa! Canada <www.conscoop.ottawa.on.ca/rgb/> <www.flora.org/afo/> Prevent Internet Wiretapping! -- FreeS/WAN:<www.freeswan.org> Thanks for voting Green! -- <green.ca> Marillion:<www.marillion.co.uk> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBOdKbp9+sBuIhFagtAQH+NQP/e4Kt2jpy4kEu0gTlUhryCbgtZ7srcZdY awY4kbGSV+qUYtm8+zP3txLZq2VgFdwxyjEUC0QU4quTaJhITdoBDc3A3ECoQqJU 9KP+lI8RIhM0N8be+qvcH6nCreHHy8xiTEkF8+Cd7lSRk4+GuRM/AQqW8xUBwG3e Mnw/8jB9MRA= =JFUs -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
