Linux 3.14 Supports AMD's Cryptographic Coprocessor

The AMD Cryptographic Coprocessor (CCP) is to be supported by the in-development Linux 3.14 kernel.

Back in November was when patches first emerged for an AMD Cryptographic Coprocessor on Linux. This co-processor provides hardware encryption and other hashing functionality for the AES crypto API, AES CMAC, XTS-AES, and SHA cryptographic interfaces within the Linux kernel.

Not much information is publicly known on this AMD Cryptographic Coprocessor but it's believed to be part of AMD's embedded ARM Cortex-A5 processor on upcoming server-class Opterons with TrustZone technology.

Besides the AMD Cryptographic Coprocessor driver for Linux 3.14, other crypto subsystem work for this next kernel release includes various optimizations, a new Freescale MXS DCP driver, and an AVX/AX2 version of AES-NI GCM encode/decode functions.

More information on these crypto changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel can be found via this pull request.