In message <20051016193507.GA2806@panix.com>, Thor Lancelot Simon writes:

>I've been working on the Hifn crypto driver recently and have noticed
>something startling: in a kernel with pseudo-device crypto and options
>FAST_IPSEC, after the system has been running for a short while, all
>crypto requests fail.

How many device contexts are you allocating?  If (dim) memory serves,
the driver knows only about the lowest-common-denominator.  I beleive
the Soekris cards have external SRAM which could, in principle, be
used for additional contexts; but the driver doesn't support that.

I know that at one point I exhausted the hardware-supported contexts,
when talking to hundedrs of IPsec peers. That was using my own private
mutant kernel (before I committed my port of Fast-IPSec), so I guess
it's possilbe that fallback to software crypto never worked, or
(less likely) got broken when other people reworked the OCF APIs.


>This causes ssh to not work (since openssl uses /dev/crypto if present)
>and it causes IPsec to not work, since encryption of every packet fails.
>
>So, it seems like the RNG now works, but nothing else does.  Has anyone
>else had better luck with this driver?  I'm using two different 7955
>cards.