Crypto hw acceleration for openssl
Winston Tsai
wtsai at hifn.com
Mon Apr 24 22:53:56 UTC 2006
Hi, Chuck:
Thanks for the info, I tried to specify the hardware device using:
openssl speed des-cbc -engine cryptodev
But still got similar performance results as those using sw lib.
> 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
> 43108.10k 44917.96k 45460.88k 45532.15k 45566.26k <= sw lib
43067.69k 44943.54k 45340.59k 45519.83k 45582.75k <= when using
'-engine cryptodev'
My version of OpenSSL lib is 0.9.7d 17 March 2004. Don't know if that
matters or not.
P.s. We are in the process of working to improve our support of hw with
the open source community; stay tuned! :-)
Regards,
Winston
-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck Swiger [mailto:cswiger at mac.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 22, 2006 6:08 AM
To: Winston Tsai
Cc: freebsd-drivers at freebsd.org; freebsd-security at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Crypto hw acceleration for openssl
Hi, Winston--
Winston Tsai wrote:
[ ...followups set to just one group... ]
> Openssl speed des-cbc
> And got the following result:
> 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
> 43251.97k 44919.41k 45342.43k 45506.13k 45579.98k
> Then I did kldunload hifn; kldunload cryptodev and ran the same test
> again, and got
> 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
> 43108.10k 44917.96k 45460.88k 45532.15k 45566.26k
>
> Version of FreeBSD is 5.3-RELEASE. I believe both crypto and cryptodev
> drivers are supported since v5.0.
You might need to try "openssl speed des-cbc -engine cryptodev" in order
to have OpenSSL actually try to use the HiFN crypto card.
You might also have to fiddle with openssl itself, since the openssl
binary that ships with the system seems to prefer to use the CPU even
when you tell it to use hardware via the /dev/crypto interface. [1]
Possibly "cd /usr/ports/security/openssl && make install" might give you
another openssl binary to try that would work better. Given the domain
of your email address, you might have better insight about how to
improve FreeBSD's support of HiFN hardware :-), and we would be happy to
adapt any such improvements.
--
-Chuck
[1]: I've heard rumors to the effect that the setup costs for accessing
the crypto hardware acceleration are fairly high and that using hardware
crypto is a win mostly only for big operations like 1024-bit RSA or DSA
key operations, that ~1GHz CPUs or faster tend to handle session-level
crypto (ie, your 48-/56-/128-bit DES or 3DES, or now perhaps 128/256-bit
AES) faster by themselves.
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