On 22/12/2010 20:27, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
That said, some operations -- and cryptographic ones in particular -- may use floating point registers and operations because for some architectures (sun4u rings a bell) this can make certain expensive
Well remembered! There are sun4u optimisations that use the floating point unit but those only apply to the bignum code which in kernel is only used by RSA.
operations go faster. I don't think this is the case for secure hash/message digest algorithms, but if you use ZFS encryption as found in Solaris 11 Express you might find that on certain systems these registers are used for performance reasons, either on the bulk crypto or on the keying operations. (More likely the latter, but my memory of these optimizations is still hazy.)
RSA isn't used at all by ZFS encryption, everything is AES (including key wrapping) and SHA256.
So those optimistations for floating point don't come into play for ZFS encryption.
-- Darren J Moffat _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
