On Friday 11 December 2009, Simon Richter wrote:

Hi,

since there has been a thread on allowing the use of a coprocessor in
the kernel already: I am wondering if it'd make sense to use AltiVec for
AES in dm-crypt, and how difficult it would be to implement that.

I'm using a PegasosII which has a G4 running at 1 GHz; I get around 3
MB/s throughput when accessing harddisks. I think that could be
improved.

If I understand correctly, the actual encryption work runs in a kernel
thread, which is scheduled normally, so it ought to be possible to
enable AltiVec for that thread; am I missing something here?

Sebastian Siewior has implemented this some time ago:

http://old.nabble.com/-RFC-0-3--Experiments-with-AES-AltiVec,-part-2-tc10034255.html

You can try the old patches on your machine to see if they are any good
there.

	Arnd <><