On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 09:52:28AM +0100, Martin Kjær Jørgensen wrote: > Hi misc > > Can a wireless interface (say, athn) make use of a hardware crypto card > like hifn when using WPA/WPA2 as encryption?
>From a quick look through the kernel: No, net80211 does not use the crypto framework, therefore it can not use any hardware crypto devices. Usually the chip itself can do the necessary operations, but that seems disabled. It's all done in software, I think. More generally, "modern" CPUs hardly break a sweat doing a few crypto ops. The overhead to talk to accelerator cards is usually large and only makes sense on (really) slow hardware. Then there is the whole issue of bus bandwidth and transferring the same data n times. > > /Martin
