On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 10:50:26AM -0400, Jean-Luc Cooke wrote:

On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 08:02:00AM +0300, Jari Ruusu wrote:

quoted

kerneli.org/cryptoapi _is_ useless joke for many needs. Fortunately other
people are able to see the limitations/sillyness of kerneli.org/cryptoapi:

1)  You are trying to replace link/insmod time overhead with runtime
    overhead + unnecessary bloat.
2)  No direct link access to low level cipher functions or higher level
    functions.
3)  No clean way to replace cipher code with processor type optimized
    assembler implementations.

Jari has a few points here.  But the "killer" functionalities are all there
IMHO.  Low-level assembler implementations are over-rated, again IMHO.  The
performance difference between C and ASM is at most 50%.  1ms vs 1.5 ms.
Even if you've got a large payload on the rare occation (>5MB) block ciphers
are quite fast for 95% of applications

According to my tests, AES ASM has given me _2x_ speed boost over C; this
fact has re-written freeswan CPU/bandwidth empirical formula to peak at
       CPU [MHz] ~= BW [Mbit/s] * 10      (instead of 25)

This boost has allowed my old Cyrix-6x86 120MHz to be my 802.11b gateway  =)


--Juanjo       freeswan algo: AES (+others), SHA2, MODP2048-4096 
               selectable algorithms support for Phase1 and 2.
	       http://www.irrigacion.gov.ar/juanjo/ipsec/

#  Juan Jose Ciarlante (JuanJo PGP) jjo ;at; mendoza.gov.ar              #
#  Key fingerprint = 76 60 A5 76 FD D2 53 E3  50 C7 90 20 22 8C F1 2D    #