DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

HIFN(4)               DragonFly Kernel Interfaces Manual               HIFN(4)

NAME
     hifn -- Hifn 7751/7951/7811/7955/7956 crypto accelerator

SYNOPSIS
     To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your
     kernel configuration file:

           device crypto
           device cryptodev
           device hifn

     Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the
     following line in loader.conf(5):

           hifn_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION
     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
     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      Comes with 512KB SRAM.

           XL-Crypt        Only board based on 7811 (which is faster than 7751
                           and has a random number generator).

           NetSec 7751     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.

SEE ALSO
     crypt(3), crypto(4), intro(4), random(4), crypto(9)

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.

HISTORY
     The hifn device driver appeared in OpenBSD 2.7.  The hifn device driver
     was imported to FreeBSD 5.0.

BUGS
     The 7751 chip starts out at initialization by only supporting
     compression.  A proprietary algorithm, which has been reverse engineered,
     is required to unlock the cryptographic functionality of the chip.  It is
     possible for vendors to make boards which have a lock ID not known to the
     driver, but all vendors currently just use the obvious ID which is 13
     bytes of 0.

DragonFly 5.1                   April 21, 2018                   DragonFly 5.1