[OpenAFS-devel] crypto backend and integration for rxgk

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Thu, 2 May 2013, Derek Atkins wrote:

> Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@MIT.EDU> writes:
>
>> Necessary is debatable.  Desirable, well, all the reasons Debian tries
>> hard to eliminate bundled libraries.  The kernel's crypto library (or
>> even an openssl krb5 backend) will offer aesni acceleration, which
>> hcrypto does not.
>
> OpenAFS cannot use the Linux kernel's crypto because last I checked the
> Linux KCrypto was GPLONLY, and OpenAFS was not GPL and therefore
> couldn't use the API.

When I say "the kernel", I mean "the kernel that the openafs kernel module 
is running in", which is by no means limited to linux.  Certainly the 
FreeBSD kernel (my personal choice) exposes crypto APIs to all loadable 
modules; it appears that OS X does so as well if I am reading XCode 
correctly.

>> I'm all for the initial implementation being hcrypto-only, but I think
>> that it makes sense to leave room for future expansion.
>
> I think it's a reasonable goal, but it's going to require lots of
> various plug-ins to support it on each platform/environment.

We know at build-time what platform is being targetted; I am imagining 
that we would just build a platform-specific file instead of a common one, 
to get the platform-specific features.

-Ben