Re: is anyone maintaining hifn(4)?

[Taylor R Campbell <riastradh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

> Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:25:56 -0700
> From: emily ingalls <emily@ingalls.rocks>
> 
> i recently got a card that uses a Hifn 7955, and figured i'd take a
> look at the driver for it while i was setting it up. i almost
> immediately found issues that would likely cause hangs or crashes
> (maybe even damage to the chip, not sure) on some machines, possibly
> unexpectedly slow operation on others, and could have unexpected and
> hard to detect side effects elsewhere due to possible clock
> instability.

Can you be more specific about the issues?  Can you say more about
your use case?

> i have a vested interest in having this driver work properly and
> securely in NetBSD, and i'm interested in sending in patches and
> possibly doing a more extensive audit/rewrite, but it looks like the
> driver is currently disabled, and there's been little work the past
> few years that hasn't been pulling changes from openbsd. so... is
> anyone maintaining it at all?
> 
> would i be better off going to OpenBSD for this, and then trying to
> merge updates here once they're accepted there (despite having
> little interest in OpenBSD personally)?

I was probably the last person to touch it, and it looks like I merged
what I thought (a year ago) were the important updates from OpenBSD as
of May 2020:

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/pci/hifn7751.c?rev=1.70&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_with_tag=MAIN

At the time, I fixed several bugs in hifn(4) and verified that my
device produced RNG output and that the crypto worked for /dev/crypto
(and, with `openssl speed', confirmed my hypothesis that it is a
crypto decelerator rather than crypto accelerator, at least relative
to the ~10yo Ivy Bridge CPU I was using to test it).

What do you mean by `currently disabled'?  It looks like hifn(4) is
included in amd64/GENERIC and i386/GENERIC, at least.

If you have any patches, I'd be happy to take a look.  (Can't test on
my device right now but I'll eventually have access to it again.)