AltiVec in the kernel

Simon Richter Simon.Richter at hogyros.de
Fri Dec 11 22:45:43 EST 2009


Hi,

since there has been a thread on allowing the use of a coprocessor in
the kernel already: I am wondering if it'd make sense to use AltiVec for
AES in dm-crypt, and how difficult it would be to implement that.

I'm using a PegasosII which has a G4 running at 1 GHz; I get around 3
MB/s throughput when accessing harddisks. I think that could be
improved.

If I understand correctly, the actual encryption work runs in a kernel
thread, which is scheduled normally, so it ought to be possible to
enable AltiVec for that thread; am I missing something here?

   Simon


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