Intel QuickAssist support?

Hubert Feyrer <[email protected]> Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:11:59 +0100 (CET)
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.devel.crypto
Message-ID <[email protected]>
According to the Intel website, QuickAssist provides ...

  * "Accelerated performance for demanding applications with Front Side Bus
    attached Field Programmable Gate Array (FSB-FPGA) hardware modules.
  * Agility to migrate from one technology to another with minimum impact
    to applications with Intel QuickAssist Technology Accelerator Abstraction
    Layer (AAL).
  * Support for small form factor accelerators with emerging technology
    codenamed "Tolapai" that combines numerous powerful enabling technology
    on a single chip.
  * Broad sweeping accelerator improvements with protocol and speed
    improvements to PCI Express* 2.0 initially proposed by Intel and IBM
    (called Geneseo*). PCI Express* 3.0 is expected to be the PCI-SIG's
    response to this proposal and will improve accelerator efficiency and
    double delivered bandwidth to 8GT/s."
(Source: http://www.intel.com/technology/platforms/quickassist/index.htm)

In other words: it's a vendor-independent interface that manufacturers of 
hardware crypto acceleration can use to provide hardware crypto, make it 
available via a standard instruction set / driver and thus reduce driver 
development efforts.

I think it would be nice to have such a driver and hook that into 
opencrypto(9).

After looking at the existing code a bit, I think this cold be done as a 
Summer-of-Code project (assuming availability of specs and possibly 
hardware).


  - Hubert