On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 10:06:46AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 04:42:13PM +0800, Herbert Xu wrote: > > Hi: > > > > 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. FWIW I don't care about user-space using kernel software crypto at all. It's the security people that do. The purpose of the user-space API is to export the hardware crypto devices to user-space. This means PCI devices mostly, as things like aesni-intel can already be used without kernel help. Now as a side-effect if this means that we can shut the security people up about adding another interface then all the better. But I will certainly not go out of the way to add more crap to the kernel for that purpose. Cheers, -- Email: Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/ PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-crypto" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
