Fedora 38 Looks To Accelerate GnuTLS With Kernel TLS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 38 Looks To Acceleratoe GnuTLS With Kernel TLS

With Fedora 37 approaching release at the end of October, more feature changes for Fedora 38 next spring are continuing to be discussed. One of the interesting proposals this week is enabling acceleration of GnuTLS using the kernel TLS (kTLS)...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-38-GnuTLS-kTLS

[Delgarde]

So which services will benefit from this? I know GnuTLS is a popular library — but there are a lot of different TLS implementations out there, and even more once you step away from the traditional C-based ecosystem.

[zoomblab]

"Offloading" work to the kernel is cheating. The term is deceiving as it is not offloading, the processing will be performed by the same processor at the expense of other software.

[saladin]

It's common for 100+Gb/s nics to have cryptographic offloads, so in many cases it's running on an accelerator. The kernel is the best piece of software to manage that sort of of acceleration inline with the nic.

This presentation from Netflix has some more detail into the benefits of kTLS for their workloads (on FreeBSD.)

https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf

[lu_tze]

"Offloading" work to the kernel is cheating. The term is deceiving as it is not offloading, the processing will be performed by the same processor at the expense of other software.

Depends on specific devices, some might have a separate crypt accelerator available, which is a case for many embedded devices. Now, with userspace libraries, the usual problem was, that they were unable to use it -- see for example OpenVPN, who was never able to use any acceleration. Kernel space modules (like ipsec, for example) were much better intergrated.

[kylew77]

Didn't know Linux had KTLS, know it was the killer app of FreeBSD 13.0 and that NetFlix uses itl

[RahulSundaram]

Didn't know Linux had KTLS, know it was the killer app of FreeBSD 13.0 and that NetFlix uses itl

Linux has had it since 2017 or so (4.13 release) and is used widely in large enterprises. It has seen some recent improvements as well. Refer to https://docs.kernel.org/networking/tls.html

[kylew77]

Linux has had it since 2017 or so (4.13 release) and is used widely in large enterprises. It has seen some recent improvements as well. Refer to https://docs.kernel.org/networking/tls.html

Wow thanks the more you know!

[pal666]

Didn't know Linux had KTLS, know it was the killer app of FreeBSD 13.0 and that NetFlix uses itl

as usual linux had it many years before freebsd