Re: Anyone running Tor on routing/switching hardware ?

[coderman <coderman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 8:52 AM, John Case <case@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> ... I am particularly interested in
> whether there are performance advantages to be had in running Tor on
> dedicated network hardware.

maybe.

yes in that network hardware often provides hardware accelerated
crypto primitives that can be utilized by Tor to accelerate the CPU
bound aspects of relaying a large amount of traffic.

no since hardware acceleration is poorly supported in OpenSSL let
alone via direct offload in Tor itself. the latter is necessary to
truly take advance of hardware acceleration for large chunks of CTR
mode or Montgomery multiplication given shortcomings in the OpenSSL
API's used by Tor.

if you have a hardware entropy device and a good userspace entropy
daemon / mixer this is always useful to Tor and OpenSSL in general.
this is manged outside of Tor or OpenSSL by administrator however.

as for particular hardware acceleration support the archives of this
list provide some details.

best regards,
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