dm-verity: hash blocks with shash import+finup when possible
Currently dm-verity computes the hash of each block by using multiple calls to the "ahash" crypto API. While the exact sequence depends on the chosen dm-verity settings, in the vast majority of cases it is: 1. crypto_ahash_init() 2. crypto_ahash_update() [salt] 3. crypto_ahash_update() [data] 4. crypto_ahash_final() This is inefficient for two main reasons: - It makes multiple indirect calls, which is expensive on modern CPUs especially when mitigations for CPU vulnerabilities are enabled. Since the salt is the same across all blocks on a given dm-verity device, a much more efficient sequence would be to do an import of the pre-salted state, then a finup. - It uses the ahash (asynchronous hash) API, despite the fact that CPU-based hashing is almost always used in practice, and therefore it experiences the overhead of the ahash-based wrapper for shash. Because dm-verity was intentionally converted to ahash to support off-CPU crypto accelerators, a full reversion to shash might not be acceptable. Yet, we should still provide a fast path for shash with the most common dm-verity settings. Another reason for shash over ahash is that the upcoming multibuffer hashing support, which is specific to CPU-based hashing, is much better suited for shash than for ahash. Supporting it via ahash would add significant complexity and overhead. And it's not possible for the "same" code to properly support both multibuffer hashing and HW accelerators at the same time anyway, given the different computation models. Unfortunately there will always be code specific to each model needed (for users who want to support both). Therefore, this patch adds a new shash import+finup based fast path to dm-verity. It is used automatically when appropriate. This makes dm-verity optimized for what the vast majority of users want: CPU-based hashing with the most common settings, while still retaining support for rarer settings and off-CPU crypto accelerators. In benchmarks with veritysetup's default parameters (SHA-256, 4K data and hash block sizes, 32-byte salt), which also match the parameters that Android currently uses, this patch improves block hashing performance by about 15% on x86_64 using the SHA-NI instructions, or by about 5% on arm64 using the ARMv8 SHA2 instructions. On x86_64 roughly two-thirds of the improvement comes from the use of import and finup, while the remaining third comes from the switch from ahash to shash. Note that another benefit of using "import" to handle the salt is that if the salt size is equal to the input size of the hash algorithm's compression function, e.g. 64 bytes for SHA-256, then the performance is exactly the same as no salt. This doesn't seem to be much better than veritysetup's current default of 32-byte salts, due to the way SHA-256's finalization padding works, but it should be marginally better. Reviewed-by: Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com> Acked-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com> Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment