Hello developers:
I am involved in helping spec a hardware accelerator.
My job is to make sure it works from a software POV,
as I am the software developer on the team.
(Actually this hardware is going to be *much* more amazing
than that - but there's an NDA, so unfortunately I cannot
shout it from the rooftops. :-( )
I have so many questions, but this one is most pressing -
Is there a reasonable upper limit on the size in bits of a BN?
For various HW reasons we were hoping we could cap BNs
at 4096 bits for ModExp functions and the like. Is this possible?
Or is there some operation that might require more? The BN
docs imply that the software-implemented BNs can be any
arbitrary size.
Also, I am researching how the BN arrays look in memory,
so that I can feed them to the hardware. The best bet would
be to do it without any translation, but if that isn't possible,
I need to know of any issues related to translating into the
format I need. It seems to me that using the BN_ULONG
type gets me mired in all sorts of endian and other
machine-dependent problems. Is that true or can the BN
be treated as a byte array of bits? (yes, I know, read the
source, study the generated code... I will... but sometimes
a quick comment is worth hours of code study.)
If any ENGINE developers wouldn't mind helping me out,
please contact me. It would help me greatly to get a
wider perspective on the use of accelerators, and your
input could help make this a better product. (how many
times have you been programming some device and said
"argh, if only they'd...")
Thanks for any assistance.
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Tom Biggs
'89 FJ1200 DoD #1146
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -
and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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