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AES-NI XTS Crypto Performance Looking Good For AMD With Linux 5.12 Fix

Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux

Of the performance-related changes with Linux 5.12 worth noting is faster AES-NI XTS performance for systems relying upon return trampolines "Retpolines" as part of the CPU's Spectre V2 mitigations. On the Intel side this primarily impacts older CPUs where Retpolines is still used while on the AMD side through Zen 3 the Retpolines is still relied upon, which as shown by these benchmarks is now much better off for AMD Ryzen AES XTS performance as measured by Cryptsetup.

As reported last year, AES-NI regressed heavily under Retpolines and seemingly went unnoticed for the better part of three years. Now with Linux 5.12 the AES-NI kernel module code has been reworked so it doesn't face such overhead in Retpolines-enabled environments and in turn really helps out with performance.

I previously ran some benchmarks while now for getting an idea as to the impact with Linux 5.12 mainline, I carried out some fresh cryptsetup benchmarks with two AMD systems of Linux 5.11 stable versus Linux 5.12 Git at the end of the merge window.

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Linux 5.12 Mostly Restores Long-Horrid AES-XTS Performance...

  • Linux 5.12 Mostly Restores Long-Horrid AES-XTS Performance Introduced By CPU-Bug Mitigations

    AES-NI XTS hardware encryption and decryption performance on Linux has been severely crippled since the Spectre V2 mitigations were introduced to the Linux kernel nearly two years ago. Linux 5.12 has fixes that mostly restores AES-NI XTS performance on the AMD side and those changes slightly increase aex-xts performance on the Intel side.

    [...]

    There is a pretty big difference between 2685.7 MiB/s and 1578.9 MiB/s, yet the lack of a practical effect is probably why this has gone unnoticed for so long. A SATA3 interface caps out at 600 MiB/s so it doesn't really matter if a full-disk encrypted machine can do hardware accelerated AES-XTS at 601 or 5000 MiB if the disk drive is connected to a SATA interface. It does make a difference if the machine has a bleeding edge high-end NVMe drive, which is likely why this was performance-regression was discovered and fixed. Linux 5.12rc1 performs a whole lot better than previous kernels did when Spectre V2 mitigations are enabled on AMD machines. The difference between the kernels default mitigations and mitigations=off is barely noticeable. That's a huge improvement mostly thanks to the hard work of Google-asset Ard Biesheuvel

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