Re: [PATCH net-next v2 6/9] net: macsec: hardware offloading infrastructure

Antoine Tenart
2019-08-20T10:03:56Z

Hi Andrew,

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 06:28:23PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > 1) With current implementation it's impossible to install SW macsec engine onto
> > the device which supports HW offload. That could be a strong limitation in
> > cases when user sees HW macsec offload is broken or work differently, and he/she
> > wants to replace it with SW one.
> > MACSec is a complex feature, and it may happen something is missing in HW.
> > Trivial example is 256bit encryption, which is not always a musthave in HW
> > implementations.
>
> It would also be nice to add extra information to the netlink API to
> indicate if HW or SW is being used. In other places where we offload
> to accelerators we have such additional information.

Agreed, in addition to being able to enable/disable the offloading we
should have a way to know if a MACsec interface is being offloaded or
not.

Thanks!
Antoine

--
Antoine Ténart, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering