Re: [PATCH net-next v3 02/17] zinc: introduce minimal cryptography library

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 8:32 AM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 4:52 PM Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I think the module organization needs to change. It needs to be possible to have chacha20 built in but AES or whatever as a module.
>
> Okay, I'll do that for v5.
>
> > I might have agreed before Spectre :(. Unfortunately, unless we do some magic, I think the code would look something like:
> >
> > if (static_branch_likely(have_simd)) arch_chacha20();
> >
> > ...where arch_chacha20 is a *pointer*. And that will generate a retpoline and run very, very slowly.  (I just rewrote some of the x86 entry code to eliminate one retpoline. I got a 5% speedup on some tests according to the kbuild bot.)
>
> Actually, the way it works now benefits from the compilers inliner and
> the branch predictor. I benchmarked this without any retpoline
> slowdowns, and the branch predictor becomes correct pretty much all
> the time. We can tinker with this after the initial merge, if you
> really want, but avoiding function pointers and instead using ordinary
> branches really winds up being quite fast.

Indeed.  What I'm saying is that you shouldn't refactor it this way
because it will be slow.  I agree it would be conceptually nice to be
able to blacklist a chacha20_x86_64 module to disable the asm, but I
think it would be very hard to get good performance.

--Andy