Thanks Ivan,

        You have some valid points about performance. I was hoping not to get 
distracted from the main thrust of my question by performance considerations 
though.

        Are their PCIe attachable crypto co-processors with current vendor 
support for FreeBSD8.x?  If anyone else reading this thread want's to chime in 
with info about current supported crypto co-processors that plug in via PCIe, 
please drop a note.


        However, I think you do deserve a reply on the performance topic...

        I am close enough to agreeing with you to not argue much about whether 
modern CPU parts can saturate a 1 Gb link with crypto data. The CPU part I am 
currently married to (a touch old but not that bad), seems to be able to 
through around 200Mb of IP-ESP data around. However, in spite of these 
observations, I would prefer if my system could handle that throughput load and 
yet have CPU power left over for other tasks.

        I'm very attracted to Andre's mention of "newer x86/amd64 CPU's see:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set";. Does anyone know if 
FreeBSD supports or will support this through either /dev/crypto or through 
openssl (or any other mechanism I guess)?




---
Ricky Charlet
Adara Networks
USA 408-433-4942






-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org] On 
Behalf Of Ivan Voras
Sent: Friday, September 03, 2010 2:49 AM
To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Cc: freebsd-secur...@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: seeking current supported crypto co-processors

On 09/03/10 02:35, Ricky Charlet wrote:
> Howdy,
>     <this messages is cross posted in freebsd-security and freebsd-net>
>
>          I'm seeking current cryptographic coprocessors supported in FreeBSD 
> 8.x.  By perusing through the crypto-dev (and subsequently referenced) man 
> page(s) I found this list:
> Hifn 7751/7951/7811/7955/7956 crypto accelerator
> SafeNet 1141/1741
> Bluesteel 5501/5601
> Broadcom bcm5801/5802/5805/5820/5821/5822/5823/5825
>
>          Those are all pretty old (and in some cases, no longer existent). 
> I'm surveying these lists to see if anyone knows of more modern chips working 
> with FreeBSD 8.x. Or if you feel some chip on the list above is up to the 
> task of near about 1 Gb throughput across a PCIe and has friendly vendor 
> support for FreeBSD, I'd sure like to hear about that too.
>

I'm not saying they are useless but are you really sure you need them?
Even on the last generation of CPUs without AES instructions you can
easily get 125 MB/s of AES-128 encryption and 300 MB/s of RC4 per CPU
core, so even one core can saturate a 1 Gbit/s link. You can setup a
cheap box to be a SSL proxy in front of the real web servers to offload SSL.


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