[Libre-soc-dev] gcc binutils sv cryptoprimitives etc

[Hendrik Boom]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 12:50:08PM -0800, Jacob Lifshay wrote:
> 
> I strongly disagree: what we *need* to get anyone to ever use our processor
> for cryptography is data-independent execution time. it doesn't need to be
> constant or even consistent (allowing instruction scheduling variations),
> it just needs to *not depend* on the actual data values that we're
> processing. If we don't provide a AES step instruction (which I think we
> should since it will make it much more palatable for OpenPower as well as
> being consistent with what lots of existing not-necessarily-cryptographic
> software expects), then at the very least we *need* a data-independent
> execution time table-lookup instruction.

Cryptography would also benefit from constant-power execution.
This may also be difficult.

-- hendrik