On 2012-12-15, Martin Kjær Jørgensen <m...@gotu.dk> wrote: > On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 11:03:00AM +0100, Tobias Ulmer wrote: >> On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 09:52:28AM +0100, Martin Kjær Jørgensen wrote: >> > Hi misc >> > >> > Can a wireless interface (say, athn) make use of a hardware crypto card >> > like hifn when using WPA/WPA2 as encryption? >> >> From a quick look through the kernel: >> >> No, net80211 does not use the crypto framework, therefore it can not use >> any hardware crypto devices. >> >> Usually the chip itself can do the necessary operations, but that seems >> disabled. It's all done in software, I think. >> >> More generally, "modern" CPUs hardly break a sweat doing a few crypto >> ops. The overhead to talk to accelerator cards is usually large and >> only makes sense on (really) slow hardware. Then there is the whole >> issue of bus bandwidth and transferring the same data n times. > > Do you think an AMD Elan 133 Mhz is "modern" enough for at 54/mbit > wireless WPA2 throughput?
No but neither will it be quick enough that pumping the data to a PCI-based crypto accelerator is going to work well.
