Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
BSDCon '03 — Abstract

Pp. 69-78 of the Proceedings

Cryptographic Device Support for FreeBSD

Samuel J. Leffler, Errno Consulting

Abstract

FreeBSD recently adopted the OpenBSD Cryptographic Framework [Keromytis et al, 2003]. In doing so it was necessary to convert the core framework to function correctly in a fully-preemptive/multiprocessor operating system environment. In addition several issues with the basic design were found to cause significant performance loss. After addressing these issues we found that FreeBSD outperformed OpenBSD on identical hardware by as much as 100% in tests that exercise only the cryptographic framework. These optimizations result in similar performance improvements for facilities like IPsec that make heavy use of the cryptographic framework. We observed that FreeBSD's Fast IPsec [Leffler, 2003] typically outperforms OpenBSD's IPsec implementation [Miltchev et al, 2002] by more than 50% on identical hardware.

We conclude that the OCF cryptographic API can be optimized and re-tuned to deliver substantially better performance than the original OCF implementation with large gains in both throughput and latency. Moreover these changes can be made with no impact on clients of the cryptographic framework: both user and kernel sofware designed for the original OCF is easily ported to the FreeBSD implementation of OCF.

  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF.
    The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2003 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 9 Sept. 2003 aw
Technical Program
BSDCon '03 Home
USENIX home