hifn4

Usage

Overview

The hifn driver supports various cards containing the Hifn 7751, 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 chipsets.

The hifn driver registers itself to accelerate DES, Triple-DES, AES (7955 and 7956 only), ARC4, MD5, MD5-HMAC, SHA1, and SHA1-HMAC operations for ipsec(4) and crypto(4).

The Hifn 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 will also supply data to the kernel random(4) subsystem.

Hardware

The hifn driver supports various cards containing the Hifn 7751, 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 chipsets, such as:

Invertex AEON

No longer being made. Came as 128KB SRAM model, or 2MB DRAM model.

Hifn 7751

Reference board with 512KB SRAM.

PowerCrypt

See http://www.powercrypt.com/. Comes with 512KB SRAM.

XL-Crypt

See http://www.powercrypt.com/. Only board based on 7811 (which is faster than 7751 and has a random number generator).

NetSec 7751

See http://www.netsec.net/. Supports the most IPsec sessions, with 1MB SRAM.

Soekris Engineering vpn1201 and vpn1211

See http://www.soekris.com/. Contains a 7951 and supports symmetric and random number operations.

Soekris Engineering vpn1401 and vpn1411

See http://www.soekris.com/. Contains a 7955 and supports symmetric and random number operations.

Caveats

The Hifn 9751 shares the same PCI ID. This chip is basically a 7751, but with the cryptographic functions missing. Instead, the 9751 is only capable of doing compression. Since we do not currently attempt to use any of these chips to do compression, the 9751-based cards are not useful.

Support for the 7955 and 7956 is incomplete; the asymmetric crypto facilities are to be added and the performance is suboptimal.