From: Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 09:30:42 +1100 > On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 02:13:17PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: >> >> But I'm still missing the part where you show that there is any actual >> use case that makes sense, and that actually improves performance. >> Maybe it's been posted somewhere else, but the thing is, you're asking >> _me_ to pull, and as a result you need to convince _me_ that this is a >> good idea. So if it's been posted/discussed extensively elsewhere, >> please point to those discussions. > > The main use-case is bulk encryption/hashing in user-space. For > example, on Sparc Niagara2 you need to use SPU (Stream Processing > Unit) in order to do crypto at 10Gb/s over the network. Because > of the hardware design, it is difficult to make use of the SPU > directly in user-space, unless you dedicate the SPU to one single > thread/user. The N2 SPU is not accessible at all from userspace. > However, this is something that has been considered and can be > easily added. The idea is to first add symmetric key storage > capability to the existing in-kernel keyring API. Once that is > done we can easily add a new setsockopt to the crypto user-interface > that retrieves the key from the kernel keyring instead of getting > it directly from user-space. That indeed would be real interesting. -- 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
