Broadcom BCM95805

Okay, so I just won an auction for a Broadcom-based hardware crypto card. Since this is supported under FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE for accelerating crypto(4), ipsec(4), and random(4) operations, I’d like to do some benchmarking of it to see just how much it does speed things up. I’m thinking of the following for doing a before/after test of random(4):

bornslippy:~% dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes transferred in 16.046981 secs (6534413 bytes/sec)
bornslippy:~%

I’m also looking at maybe using John the Ripper as john –test if I can determine if it actually uses crypto(9). I think that OpenSSL’s benchmark openssl test would be a good idea, because it will provide the ability to look at the effects of the card on OpenSSL, as I’m fairly certain that it does use crypto(9).

Does anyone have any other ideas as to what might be a good benchmark? I don’t think I can really test ipsec(4), but since I won’t be using it, I don’t think it’ll matter too much.

Hmm, I hope my understanding of how the driver registers itself and what it utilizes it is in line with reality…