On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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 -- 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
