I instrumented iperf with and without ipsec, just using esp-null, and 1 thread, to keep things simple. I'm seeing some pretty dismal performance numbers with ipsec, and trying to think of ways to improve this. Here are my findings, please share feedback. I suspect that a big part of the problem is the implicit loss of GSO, and this is made worse by some inefficiencies in the xfrm code: for single stream iperf (to avoid effects of rx-hash), I see the following on a 10G p2p ethernet link. 8.5-9.5 Gbps clear traffic, TSO disabled, so GSO, GRO is in effect 3-4 Gbps clear traffic, with both TSO/GSO disabled 1.8-2 Gbps for esp-null. So the above numbers suggest that losing TSO/GSO results in one big drop in performance, and then there's another cliff for the clear -> esp-null transition. And those cliffs apply even if you are merely doing TCP-MD5 or AO for basic protection of the TCP connection. I tried moving things about a bit to defer the ipsec after GSO - I'll share my experimental patch as an RFC in a separate thread. (Disclaimer: the patch is just an experiment at this point). In that patch, I'm only focussing on esp-null and transp-mode ipsec for now, just to get some basic performance numbers to see if this is at all interesting. Essentially my hack mainly involves the following - don't disable TSO in sk_setup_caps() if a dst->header_len is found - in xfrm4_output, if GSO is applicable, bail out without esp header addition - that will get done after skb_segment() - at the end of tcp_gso_segment() (when tcp segment is available), set things up for xfrm_output_one and trigger the esp_output.. I have to be very careful about setting up skb pointers here, since it looks like esp_output overloads the mac_header pointer e.g., for setting up the ip protocol field If I do all these things, the ipsec+iperf improves slightly- for esp-null, I move from approx 1.8 Gbps to about 3 Gbps, but clearly, this is still quite far from the 8 - 9 Gbps that I can get with just GSO+GRO for non-ipsec traffic. There are some inefficiencies that I can see in the xfrm code, that I am inheriting in my patch, e.g.,: memory management in the xfrm code has room for improvement. Every pass through xfrm_transport_output ends up doing a (avoidable?) memmove, and each pass through esp_output ends up doing a kmalloc/free of the "tmp" buffer. But these are all still relatively small things - tweaking them doesnt get me significantly past the 3 Gbps limit. Any suggestions on how to make this budge (or design criticism of the patch) would be welcome. --Sowmini -- 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