Ranting about OCF / crypto(9)

[Conrad Meyer]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 11:46 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> --------
> In message <3790717.UIxaijsHl3 at ralph.baldwin.cx>, John Baldwin writes:
>
>>- OCF is over flexible and overly broad.
>
> I would actually argue that it is neithe, quite the contrary.
>
> With the kernel-userland transition becoming more expensive, what
> we need is a DSL where you can put entire processing steps into the
> kernel, sort of like BPF but more general.
>
> Ideally, you should be able to push something like this into
> the kernel and have it executed in a single syscall:
>
>         h = hash:sha256()
>         b = file_buffer()
>         f = open("/tmp/foo", "r")
>         while f.read(b):
>                 h.input(b)
>         return h.hex()
>
> BPF is the existence proof that stuff like this is both
> feasible and profitable, now we just need to take it to
> the next level.
>
> If we had a language like this, accept-filters whouldn't be
> necessary.

Sure, that's a great idea (well, aside from introducing a large attack
surface that the Linux folks have repeatedly discovered with eBPF).
But, embedding lua or something like lua in the kernel is completely
tangential to the problem of providing a good generic interface for
crypto hardware.  Please don't hijack this thread with that
discussion.

Conrad