Re: Enabling AESNI by default

On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 3:20 PM Kristof Provost <kp_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

> On 31 Dec 2020, at 23:09, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > Its for ever dead code on a large number of machines that do not have
> > the hardware for it.  I know that is a decreasing set, but imho it
> > would be better to somehow ONLY load the module if you had CPU
> > support for it.  The down side is that detection would probably have
> > to be in the laoder as this code can be used very early on.
> >
> According to kldstat it uses all of 42KB of memory.
>
>      16    1 0xffffffff83313000     a290 aesni.ko
>
> That’s such a trivial amount of memory it’s not even worth
> mentioning. Even in tiny embedded systems (and who runs tiny embedded
> systems on x86?) it’s utterly insignificant.
>
> Even if it were significant, how many of the systems without the
> relevant hardware are ever going to run 13?
>
> Regards,
> Kristof
>

And tiny embedded systems are probably running custom kernels anyway, so
they can remove it.  I'm sold.  Let's put it in GENERIC.
-Alan