Re: optimized SHA1 (was Re: [Monotone-devel] net.venge.monotone.experiment.performance)

[Johan Bolmsjö]

On Saturday 05 August 2006 09:40, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> It'd be nicer to just free the hand-written asm SHA1 cores that
> OpenSSL uses from the advertising clause, and ideally fold them into
> Botan.  I started a page on the wiki working out what would need to
> happen to make this work:
>   http://venge.net/monotone/wiki/SpeedySpeedySHA1
>

One thing to keep in mind is that there are hardware accelerators for SHA1 out 
there and I think OpenSSL has support for some of them. Wouldn't it be nice 
if monotone had support for the hardware accelerators?

I'm mostly thinking about the VIA CPUs with PadLock instructions.
http://www.logix.cz/michal/devel/padlock/phe_sum.xp?show_selected=1&msgid=450

On the other hand there are Linux kernel drivers for these accelerators in the 
bottom so one could use them directly without going through OpenSSL...

P.S.
Unfortunately I don't have a PadLock CPU. I'm curious about  the performance 
gains that would provide with monotone. I use my (pre-PadLock) Mini-ITX as 
monotone server among other things.

/Johan