[tcas]

I'm still surprised that they did not include a crypto accelerator on the Pi4. It seems like a very low cost peripheral, with a high performance impact for many use cases (drive encryption, network encryption, etc...). I ran some benchmarks between a Pi4 and a Nanopi M4 and it wasn't even close.

[_joel]

Did you try different ciphers? Whilst there's no AES acceleration there are other ciphers that can leverage the hardware better. i.e. ChaCha20

[tcas]

Not really, I mostly cared about AES which was around 25x faster. Here's what a NanoPi M4 does:

  Cryptsetup
  #     Algorithm |       Key |      Encryption |      Decryption
          aes-cbc        128b       465.5 MiB/s       654.0 MiB/s
  
  OpenSSL Speed for ChaCha
  type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes  16384 bytes
  chacha20-poly1305    85242.48k   144024.55k   265936.64k   309418.33k   317977.94k   317658.45k

vs Pi4

  Cryptsetup
  #     Algorithm |       Key |      Encryption |      Decryption
          aes-cbc        128b        18.9 MiB/s        31.9 MiB/s
  
  OpenSSL Speed for ChaCha
  type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes  16384 bytes
  chacha20-poly1305    24833.53k    55555.22k    90574.34k    99022.17k   102659.41k   100592.30k

[_joel]

Could always try AES-Adiantum for storage encryption. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=275542