Re: hifn accelerator slows things down?

["Nathan J. Williams" <nathanw%wasabisystems.com@localhost>]

der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost> writes:

> At first sight this seems surprising - an accelerator makes things
> slower? - but on reflection it's not all that impossible; presumably
> the syscall overhead cost is swamping the crypto speedup.  (I assume
> the hifn would actually help something like IPsec that's entirely
> in-kernel and hence doesn't have to pay a syscall cost to talk to the
> accelerator chip.)

In addition to the usual syscall overhead, the /dev/crypto
implementation has to pay to copy the data into the kernel, perform
the operation, and then copy the result back out.

        - Nathan