GELI speed

[Clayton Milos]

Hi Pawel

I'm running GELI encryption on a hardware RAID5 (8x1TB), formatted to 6.3T 
usable space using i386 FreeBSD 7.3-PRERELEASE. Write speeds to the drive 
are just over 40MB/s which is not too bad but I would like to improve it as 
the drive gets 270MB/s without encryption.

I've run the following tests:
dd if=/dev/gzero.eli of=/dev/null bs=1m count=4096
4294967296 bytes transferred in 99.763266 secs (43051591 bytes/sec)
and then
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.file bs=1m count=1024
1073741824 bytes transferred in 26.118988 secs (41109626 bytes/sec)

There is not much speed lost due to the filesystem throughput or the RAID 
card.

I have 2 AMD Opteron 248 (2205.02-MHz 686-class CPU) in the box. I have just 
bought another motherboard that will accept dual-core and intend on 
upgrading to 2 dual core CPU's. My next step is to install AMD64 FreeBSD 8.2 
to see if this improves performance any. I did not install AMD64 originally 
because it was giving some issues and I didn't have time to debug it. Will 
AMD64 have any speed improvement on encryption processing, being 64 bit? 
Also will having more cores help if I am using the box as a Samba share?

I have a Cavium 1230 and Cavium Nitrox XL encryption cards available to me. 
So far I cannot see any drivers available for them for FreeBSD and even with 
the SDK I could not write a driver as my knowledge of C is not very good. 
Would these cards or another supported encryption card that can do AES-CBC 
128 help with the speed? Is the GELI provider able to take advantage of 
encryption coprocessors?

Thanks
Clay