On Fri, January 7, 2011 04:26, Darren J Moffat wrote: > On 06/01/2011 23:07, David Magda wrote: > >> Would running on recent T-series servers, which have have on-die crypto >> units, help any in this regard? > > The on chip SHA-256 implementation is not yet used see: > > http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/improving_zfs_dedup_performance_via > > "Note that the fix I integrated only uses a software implementation of > SHA256 on the T5120 (UltraSPARC T2) and is not (yet) using the on CPU > hardware implementation of SHA256. The reason for this is to do with > boot time availability of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework and the > need to have ZFS as the root filesystem." > > Not yet changed it turns out to be quite complicated to fix due to very > early boot issues.
Out of curiosity, would a two-stage system be practical: use the software-only code for boot, and then switch to hardware assistance (if available) later on? Generally a few extra CPUs cycles wouldn't be a big deal on start up (not much else running), but once you get to multi-user mode, the hardware should be ready to go and the CPU offloading would be more pertinent. It's necessary to start off in software-only mode to a certain extent anyway, since there's still plenty of machines out there without crypto (the M-series servers, as well as x86). _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
