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New Patches Would Make All Kernel Encryption/Decryption Faster On x86/x86_64 Hardware


On top of all the recent x86/x86_64 Linux kernel crypto improvements made recently by Google engineer Eric Biggers to better laverage AVX-512 and other modern x86 ISA features, a new patch-set posted today by Biggers would help make all x86/x86_64 kernel encryption/decryption at least slightly faster.

Eric Biggers explained with this RFC patch series:"This patchset fixes a longstanding issue where kernel-mode FPU (i.e., SIMD) was not reliably usable in softirqs in x86, which was creating the need for a fallback. This patchset aligns x86 with other architectures such as arm, arm64, and riscv by making kernel-mode FPU work in softirqs reliably. I also benchmarked bidirectional IPsec, which has been claimed to often hit the edge case where kernel-mode FPU was previously not usable in softirq context.

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