Re: RSA support into kernel?

[Evgeniy Polyakov <johnpol@2ka.mipt.ru>]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 04:05:33AM -0700, David Miller (davem@davemloft.net) wrote:
> From: Evgeniy Polyakov <johnpol@2ka.mipt.ru>
> Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2007 14:37:31 +0400
> 
> > On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 03:48:51PM -0700, Gautam Singaraju (gautam.singaraju@gmail.com) wrote:
> > > Is there any attempts being made to provide software based RSA
> > > cryptographic support in kernel level? I see that 2.6.21 supports
> > > Hardware devices such as VIA Padlock ACE. Has anybody had a change to
> > > use such a system?
> > 
> > VIA padlock engine or RSA? The former is heavily used in the wild, but
> > why would anyone want to use RSA in the kernel?
> 
> Automatic SSL done in-kernel on user data for socket I/O, with
> hardware offload from the crypto layer when available.
> 
> Solaris has done this for quite some time and it helps a lot for
> things like the VIA and Niagara.

I.e. for userspace stuff? That is obviously the right usage, but Linux
cryptoapi does not have userspace interface, so was my question.
Actually I was several times already asked after acrypto was closed, how
userspace can use new hardware drivers, and frankly I do not know what
the best userspace API would look like (in one of the projects I already 
used all three methods one-by-one and failed to determine the best). 
Simple char device read/write or ioctl, or blocking/nonblocking syscall 
over file descriptor, or anything else?

-- 
	Evgeniy Polyakov