3 ms·

Everything old is new again: Anyone remember seeing a 32-bit/33 MHz PCI (not pci-x, not pci-e) card for SSL acceleration in the late 1990s? It was totally a th

Everything old is new again: Anyone remember seeing a 32-bit/33 MHz PCI (not pci-x, not pci-e) card for SSL acceleration in the late 1990s? It was totally a thing at one point in time when your typical 1U rackmount server was single-core CPUs and quite weak in overall math processing power. OpenBSD had support for them like 22 years ago. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=SSL+accelerator+pci+card+openbsd https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=SSL+accel... Now we have TLS1.2/TLS1.3 offload getting built into the PCI-E 4.0 100/200/400GbE (whatever speed) NIC.

drewg123 4y ago
The cards you reference are not really the same thing. They are doing lookaside acceleration, where the card has to transfer the data from host memory, encrypt it, and transfer it back. The Mellanox (and Chelsio) NICs do in-line crypto. They DMA down the network packets as they would have to do anyway in order to send them. Then they encrypt them on their way out onto the wire. This reduces memory bandwidth requirements by roughly 50%.