Re: [PATCH] crypto: qce - Remove driver

[Eric Biggers]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 08:51:44AM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:
> It is consuming a lot of the community's time to help maintain,
> including dealing with LLM-found bugs, with no clear benefit to anyone.
> Even considering *just today* we can see someone sent a bug fix:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/20260724081537.191992-2-thorsten.blum@xxxxxxxxx/

Another example:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/d5de5a55-eb35-4ad5-8d53-12e188e156cb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/

> It definitely *was* causing problems before it was disabled via the
> crypto priority system (which made it unused in the kernel) and dropped
> it from AF_ALG (which removed most of the unprivileged attack surface).
> When anyone accidentally used it, it caused at least a huge performance
> problem, and sometimes other problems too like filesystem hangs.  It was
> an issue for years.

This actually seems to have been an overly-optimistic characterization!
As per
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/d5de5a55-eb35-4ad5-8d53-12e188e156cb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
this driver drains the battery on every system with the module loaded,
even when no crypto requests are actually sent to it.

- Eric