Hi Dave,
I took a look at your driver to try to understand what's going on here
and what the disagreement is all about.
It looks like this is some sort of PCIe HSM device. As far as I know,
Linux doesn't have a standardized API for HSM devices (somebody correct
me if I'm wrong), and probably that doesn't quite make sense, either,
seeing as most HSMs are accessed anyway through userspace "drivers" --
that is, via libusb or over some networking protocol, or something else.
Your situation is different in that it uses PCIe, so you need some
kernel mediation in order to give access to your userspace components.
And, different manufacturers' HSMs expose very different pieces of
functionality, and I'm not sure a unified API for them would even make
sense.
It looks like this driver exposes some device file, with a few IOCTLs
and then support for reading and writing from and to the device. Besides
some driver control things, what actually goes into the device -- that
is, the protocol one must use to talk to the thing -- isn't actually
described by the driver. You're just shuffling bytes in and out with
some mediation around that.
Can you confirm to me whether or not the above is accurate?
If so, then I'm not sure this belongs in the purview of the crypto list
or has anything much to do with Linux crypto. This is a PCIe driver for
some hardware that userspace has to talk to in order to do some stuff
with it.
However, there's something else that you wrote that might make people
less inclined to merge this:
> Our driver code is just a tube between proprietary code on the host
machine and proprietary code on the HSM.
It sounds like you need the kernel to expose your PCIe device in a way
userspace can access, so that you can talk to it using proprietary code.
In other words, this is a kernel driver that exists only to support
closed source components. I have no idea about "official policy" on this
matter, but I could imagine some people howling about it. On the other
hand, the driver _is_ doing something, and it seems like your hardware
is somewhat complicated to interface with, and who wouldn't want an open
source driver for that, even if it's just the low-level kernel/PCIe
components?
Anyway, if my suppositions above are indeed correct, I'd encourage you
to submit your driver to whoever maintains drivers/misc/ (Greg and Arnd,
IIRC), and ignore the fact that your hardware has something to do with
cryptography (though little to do with the Linux crypto API's range of
responsibilities).
Jason
