Enabling AESNI by default

[Chris]

On 2020-12-31 11:51, Allan Jude wrote:
> We've had the AESNI module for quite a few years now, and it has not
> caused any problems.
> 
> I am wondering if there are any objections to including it in GENERIC,
> so that users get the benefit without having to have the "tribal
> knowledge" that 'to accelerate kernel crypto (GELI, ZFS, IPSEC, etc),
> you need to load aesni.ko'
> 
> Userspace crypto that uses openssl or similar libraries is already
> taking advantage of these CPU instructions if they are available, by
> excluding this feature from GENERIC we are just causing the "out of the
> box" experience to by very very slow for crypto.
> 
> For example, writing 1MB blocks to a GELI encrypted swap-backed md(4)
> device:
> 
> with 8 jobs on a 10 core Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz
> 
> fio --filename=/dev/md0.eli --device=1 --name=geli --rw=write --bs=1m
> --numjobs=8 --iodepth=16 --end_fsync=1 --ioengine=pvsync
> --group_reporting --fallocate=none --runtime=60 --time_based
> 
> 
> stock:
> write: IOPS=530, BW=530MiB/s (556MB/s) (31.1GiB/60012msec)
> 
> with aesni.ko loaded:
> write: IOPS=2824, BW=2825MiB/s (2962MB/s) (166GiB/60002msec)
> 
> 
> Does anyone have a compelling reason to deny our users the 5x speedup?
FWIW I'd just like to suggest that I'm a +1 for adding it to GENERIC.
Thanks for suggesting this, and have a Happy New Year!

--Chris