OK, so I've been hacking on and testing my shiny new
One A110 mini-laptop during the last few days and I must say I'm very happy with it. I'll write up some more details later (check the
wiki if you're impatient), but today I want to highlight a very nice feature of this laptop (compared to, for instance, the Eee PC): The VIA C7-M ULV CPU in the laptop has
VIA Padlock support.
VIA Padlock is a hardware feature in recent VIA CPUs which provides hardware-accelerated AES and SHA-1/SHA-256 support, among other things. This can be used in Linux (with the proper drivers and patches) to improve performance of dm-crypt, OpenSSL (and all programs using it), scp, sha1sum, OpenVPN, etc. etc.
I have written a quite extensive
VIA Padlock HOWTO and benchmarks in the A110 wiki (but all of this will work on other systems which have VIA Padlock, too).
To summarize, here are the most important benchmarks:
dm-crypt (256bit AES, cbc-essiv:sha256)
Without VIA Padlock support:
$ hdparm -tT /dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt
/dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt:
Timing cached reads: 448 MB in 2.00 seconds = 223.47 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 22 MB in 3.07 seconds = 7.17 MB/sec
With VIA Padlock support:
$ hdparm -tT /dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt
/dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt:
Timing cached reads: 502 MB in 2.00 seconds = 250.41 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 90 MB in 3.07 seconds = 29.36 MB/sec
The native speed of the
SSD in the laptop is 31.01 MB/sec, so there is almost no performance penalty when using VIA Padlock.
OpenSSL
OpenSSL speed benchmark, first line without Padlock, second line with Padlock enabled:
$ openssl speed -evp aes-256-cbc [-engine padlock]
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-256-cbc 9187.18k 10572.28k 11054.32k 11179.36k 11218.02k
aes-256-cbc 47955.92k 150619.73k 325730.73k 458320.11k 520520.79k
ssh/scp
Without VIA Padlock support:
$ scp -c aes256-cbc bigfile.dat localhost:/dev/null
bigfile.dat 100% 159MB 5.9MB/s 00:27
With VIA Padlock support:
$ scp -c aes256-cbc bigfile.dat localhost:/dev/null
bigfile.dat 100% 159MB 14.5MB/s 00:11
OpenVPN
A real speed benchmark is pending (not measurable easily on 100MBit LAN, will try on a slower link), but as OpenVPN uses OpenSSL is should have roughly the same speedup iff you tell OpenVPN to use AES (it uses Blowfish per default).
Also, there's a measurable difference in CPU load while tranferring large files over OpenVPN: 8% CPU load with VIA Padlock (vs. 20% CPU load without VIA Padlock).
sha1sum / phe_sum
phe_sum is a small C program which can be used as drop-in replacement for sha1sum (which doesn't support VIA Padlock yet). Quick benchmark:
sha1sum, without VIA Padlock:
$ time sha1sum bigfile.dat
real 0m6.511s
user 0m5.864s
sys 0m0.412s
phe_sum (with VIA Padlock support):
$ time ./phe_sum bigfile.dat
real 0m1.149s
user 0m0.704s
sys 0m0.424s
All in all VIA Padlock gives you a pretty impressive speedup for many crypto-using applications on Linux, which is especially useful on the A110 mini-laptop (think OpenVPN or scp for mobile usage, and dm-crypt for an encrypted SSD, of course).
When finishing series of articles about Debian packaging and writing
about dbconfig-common, I just had to ask myself, why it is not used in
phpMyAdmin package. I did not find any reason and as Thijs did not have any
objections, I hacked it together this evening.
So what you will get? All fancy features where phpMyAdmin requires it's
database to manage some additional features. For example you can create PDF
pages with structure of your database, add additional comments to databases,
notice relations between MyISAM tables, etc. Simply see wiki for more
details.
Besides this, phpMyAdmin is now automatically configured to use database
you choose using dbconfig-common, so you can also connect to remote MySQL
server without manually configuring anything.
The only thing which scares me a bit is that we now increased a lot number of
debconf questions user has to reply by this...
A few weeks ago we released version 2.2.0, and now version 2.2.1 of 
Two interesting nearly-free-software articles about Free Software for Libraries:-
I am following closely this 
… 
over 96% successful
Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD
team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official
announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow
shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who
did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We
appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before
going to Argentina.
This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel
image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the
infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs.
Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this
release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the
The msttcorefonts package, downloader of the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web, has been renamed to 
If like me you still get the 
It's official, I am revoking my gpg key because after 
Wat. een. deceptie.