[Cryptography] Speeding up Linux disk encryption

[Arnold Reinhold]

I found this interesting article from Cloudfare on their efforts to speed up Linux disk encryption:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryption/ <https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryption/>

The level of complexity seems concerning given the increased opportunity for error. One obstacle that struck me is the the Intel AES-NI hardware instructions cannot be used within interrupt service routines because the Intel instructions use the floating point registers to store the round constants and Linux interrupts do not save those registers for performance reasons. Also floating point operations can throw their own interrupts, which could be problematic. (One is advised not to use floating point in Linux interrupt service routines for these reasons.) Does ARM AES hardware have similar problems? RISC-V?

Arnold Reinhold
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