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Tue, 05 Jun 2007

Problems with HIFN driver development for cryptoapi.


Actually it is more serious problem.
Existing crypotapi is very software-centric, i.e. it does not have any hardware context nad thus should not initialize it per request. In hardware (at least in HIFN) each crypto request must be programmed into device's ROM and registers, so when user creates a new crypto request (read: new crypto user requests operations creating crypto TFM structure), it is only assigned with software context, which contains besides other fields, crypto functions (encrypt/decrypt/setkey), but does not contain pointer to crypto device (since software does not need it, it can store and initialize itself in setkey time).

Another crypto devices (padlock and geode) do not have such problems, since padlock just uses the same software approach, but with different asm instructions, and geode has only one device, which has global pointer accessed from crypto processing functions.

/devel/acrypto/hifn :: Link / Comments (0)

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