Intel Posts New Iteration Of Key Locker Support For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Posts New Iteration Of Key Locker Support For Linux

With Intel Tiger Lake mobile processors introduced last year there has been good open-source support going back to launch, but a few of the more niche features have seen slower than normal handling for getting the features supported by the upstream Linux kernel. The latest patch series being revived now is for Intel Key Locker support...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Key-Locker-v3-Linux

[Volta]

Ok, for how much?

[Cape]

Noice! This screams hardware-imposed DRM all the way!

It kills all the principles of free software for good

[nils_]

With this new patch series they acknowledge Key Locker usage can result in ~5x slower performance than raw AES-NI usage, but they are aiming Key Locker for dealing with disk encryption. In disk encryption scenarios, the disk throughput performance is more likely to be a bottleneck than Key Locker itself.

On my tiger lake laptop I get ~5300MiB/s encryption/decryption speed with LUKS, likely using VAES from AVX-512. The manufactures claims over 7000MiB/s sequential for the SSD, so I'm not sure how that statement can hold.