geom_eli and Safenet/hifn crypto accelerators

[Peter Schuller]

Hello,

I am looking to purchase a supported crypto accelerator. Not for performance, 
but to off-load the CPU.

The soekris hifn products are cheap and easy to obtain, but Googling yields a 
lot of posts that indicate there may be problems with the hardware.

Safenet seems to be the other option (though I have yet to find a reseller) - 
but I have not found a single post anywhere about anybody's experience using 
it with geli in particular, nor FreeBSD in general.

Does anyone have any recommendations regarding this? All I care about is low 
CPU usage and stability; performance is secondary.

As a bonus, if anyone has CPU usage benchmarks for geli I'd be interested in 
seeing them. I did find one comparison while Googling, but it was completely 
inconsistent with what I am seeing. I am seeing complete CPU saturation doing 
sequential I/O on a USB device at about 10 meg/sec. (Actually 50% system 
utilization on a dual-core 3800+, which I take to be one core saturated 
unless geli is able to use both CPU:s for the same userland I/O operation.)

Thanks!

-- 
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB

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