Intel AES-NI module doesn't get loaded automatically

[Karol Babioch]

Hi,

my hardware supports the AES-NI instruction set, which is a performance
boost.

I'm pretty sure that the appropriate module (aesni_intel) was loaded
automatically in the past, which seems not to be the case anymore.

I probably could place it in /etc/rc.conf or something like that, but
before going for it, I would like to know why it doesn't get loaded
automatically in the first place any longer.

Is this something intentional or some sort of bug/regression? Maybe it
has something to do with the switch to kmod a few weeks ago?

Anyone else experienced this?

Best regards,
Karol Babioch

[Christoph Vigano]

Post by Karol Babioch
Hi,
my hardware supports the AES-NI instruction set, which is a performance
boost.
I'm pretty sure that the appropriate module (aesni_intel) was loaded
automatically in the past, which seems not to be the case anymore.
I probably could place it in /etc/rc.conf or something like that, but
before going for it, I would like to know why it doesn't get loaded
automatically in the first place any longer.
Is this something intentional or some sort of bug/regression? Maybe it
has something to do with the switch to kmod a few weeks ago?
Anyone else experienced this?
Best regards,
Karol Babioch

As far as I can tell, kmod is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for
the deprecated tools of module-init-tools. Nonetheless bugs may be there ;)

Can you still load aesni_intel by hand? Are you sure the module has not
been renamed to something else? Intel renamed iwlagn to iwlwifi some
time ago, didn't notice that at first.

Greetings,
Christoph
--
AUR, IRC: kritztopf
BBS, GitHub: kritter

[Genes MailLists]

Post by Karol Babioch
my hardware supports the AES-NI instruction set, which is a performance
boost.
I'm pretty sure that the appropriate module (aesni_intel) was loaded
automatically in the past, which seems not to be the case anymore.

..

Post by Karol Babioch
Anyone else experienced this?

For what its worth - another datapoint - on my lenovo w520 it loads
automatically

# lsmod | egrep aes
aesni_intel 47378 66
aes_x86_64 7508 1 aesni_intel
cryptd 8309 17 aesni_intel
aes_generic 26138 2 aes_x86_64,aesni_intel

and I have (tho I cannot say one way or another on earlier kernel/kmod)

pacman -Q linux kmod
linux 3.2.6-1
kmod 5-4

[Genes MailLists]

Also, ff you're using 32bit system this may or may not be relevant ...

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/16/100

gene

[Thomas Bächler]

Post by Karol Babioch
Hi,
my hardware supports the AES-NI instruction set, which is a performance
boost.
I'm pretty sure that the appropriate module (aesni_intel) was loaded
automatically in the past, which seems not to be the case anymore.

There was a bug in kmod about this, but it should be fixed now. Make
sure you have the latest kmod and update your initramfs, too.

[Karol Babioch]

Hi,

Post by Christoph Vigano
Can you still load aesni_intel by hand?

Yes, I can load it manually.

Post by Christoph Vigano
For what its worth - another datapoint - on my lenovo w520 it loads
automatically

Good to know ;).

Post by Christoph Vigano
Also, ff you're using 32bit system this may or may not be relevant ...

No, I'm running 64bit here.

Post by Christoph Vigano
There was a bug in kmod about this, but it should be fixed now. Make
sure you have the latest kmod and update your initramfs, too.

Yeah, 3.2.6-1 seems to fix it. Was it fixed with 3.2.5 already? To be
honest I'm not entirely sure whether I've rebooted with 3.2.5, so I'm
not sure whether the initramfs was actually used. Thanks anyway ;).

Best regards,
Karol Babioch

[Thomas Bächler]

Post by Karol Babioch

Post by Thomas Bächler
There was a bug in kmod about this, but it should be fixed now. Make
sure you have the latest kmod and update your initramfs, too.

Yeah, 3.2.6-1 seems to fix it. Was it fixed with 3.2.5 already? To be
honest I'm not entirely sure whether I've rebooted with 3.2.5, so I'm
not sure whether the initramfs was actually used. Thanks anyway ;).

There was no problem in the kernel.

However, if you load the aes module in initramfs (due to hard disk
encryption), the version of kmod is used that was installed when you
generated the initramfs.

As I said, older kmod versions had a bug that would - under certain
circumstances - fail to load aesni_intel. After a kmod or udev update, I
advise you to run 'mkinitcpio -p linux' so that the latest versions of
kmod and udev are used during early boot.