Re: [Bacula-users] [Bacula-devel] Possibility of parallelising encryption?

[Steve P. <ko...@co...>]

On 04/08/10 09:34, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On 8/04/2010 8:03 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>    
>> On 04/08/10 02:16, Craig Ringer wrote:
>>      
>>> Bacula should probably work with Intel's hardware crypto out of the box.
>>> If it doesn't, most likely all that'd be required would be to call:
>>>
>>>           ENGINE_load_builtin_engines();
>>>           ENGINE_register_all_complete();
>>>        
>    
>> Sounds like a good idea to me.  Want to write up a patch?
>>      
> I will, at that. I even have some Via C3 machines to test it on, though
> they're thin clients so I'll need to take one out of service for a bit
> and chuck a disk in it.
>
>
>    
I've tried the above (loading and registering engines, specifically 
selecting various hardware engines) twice in the past and did not come 
up with anything useful.  Bacula would crash after the first write to a 
EVP cipher context that was using an engine other than the default 
software one.  I can dig up some more details if you like.  Perhaps it 
was something specific to FreeBSD, though.

Nonetheless, I would be glad to test any patches you come up with.  I 
have a handful of different HW crypto cards at my disposal including Via 
C3, Hifn cards, and Broadcom cards.  Unfortunately, I should note, none 
of them produce speeds comparable to a modern CPU, especially when 
operations are performed with small blocksizes - however, they are still 
useful for offloading the crypto load and freeing up the CPU.