Yesterday linux 3.3.0 has been released, one of the less talked features is the new assembly optimized Serpent cipher algorithm.
Serpent is a symmetric keyblock cipher which was a finalist in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) contest, where it came second to Rijndael. Serpent was designed by Ross Anderson, Eli Biham, and Lars Knudsen.
Source: Wikipedia
My laptop’s root is Serpent encrypted, so this is an awesome news for me. If you have an encrypted root you can easily benchmark the cipher performance with
hdparm -t /dev/mapper/vg-root
while you can see the potential of the disk with
hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 750 MB in 3.00 seconds = 249.75 MB/sec
The new assembly optimized cipher proved to be 3x times faster on my laptop, you can find the commits here:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6.git;a=commit;
h=937c30d7f560210b0163035edd42b2aef78fed9e
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6.git;a=commit;
h=251496dbfc1be38bc43b49651f3d33c02faccc47
Also, linux 3.2 carries an SSSE3 based SHA1 implementation for x86-64 (up to 2.3x faster). I’m pretty sure it is of much more interest because it is widely used in ipsec tunnels.
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