Re: RFC: Crypto API User-interface

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 10:06:46AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 04:42:13PM +0800, Herbert Xu wrote:

quoted

Hi:

This is what I am proposing for the Crypto API user-interface.

Can you explain why we would ever want a userspace interface to it?

doing crypto in kernel for userspace consumers sis simply insane.
It's computational intensive code which has no business in kernel space
unless absolutely required (e.g. for kernel consumers).  In addition
to that adding the context switch overhead and address space transitions
is god awfull too.

This all very much sounds like someone had far too much crack.

FWIW I don't care about user-space using kernel software crypto at
all.  It's the security people that do.

The purpose of the user-space API is to export the hardware crypto
devices to user-space.  This means PCI devices mostly, as things
like aesni-intel can already be used without kernel help.

Now as a side-effect if this means that we can shut the security
people up about adding another interface then all the better.  But
I will certainly not go out of the way to add more crap to the
kernel for that purpose.

Cheers,
-- 
Email: Herbert Xu [off-list ref]
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
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