Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amluto 49 days ago
A hardware accelerated DMA-capable cipher implementation is an odd thing, and it’s generally not useful on its own. You might want to set up a whole chain of operations (encrypt, checksum, send to network, for example), but I’ve never encountered a case where you actually want to ask an accelerator to asynchronously encrypt application data and return the encrypted data to the application.
1 comments

Unless you're pushing a ton of extra work into a network-capable accelerator, that sounds exactly like what you'd want for, e.g., an encrypted S3 implementation. You have encryption, RS encoding, striped checksumming, sending fragments to multiple hosts, some sort of potentially interesting partial failure handling, etc.

You could push that all down to the accelerator, but if there are even a few such use cases you might want a dedicated DMA-capable implementation instead.