crypto accelerators

[Dave Cornejo]

I've read here before (or maybe some other freebsd list) that cards
like the Soekris 1401 don't gain as much as you'd expect due to moving
packets to/from the card over the PCI bus.  But the context is usually
one of trying to encrypt packets to increase throughput.

So the question is whether these cards, regardless of their affect on
throughput, increase usable CPU cycles?  I have several Soekris 1401
cards and am wondering if there would be any point to putting them
into some machines that provide logins over ssh.  These machines are
generally pretty good spec, 2.4GHz+, 1GB RAM, Intel MBs, mostly
on-board peripherals.

dave c