# Raspberry pi4 and low crypto performance



## jcmichot (Jan 30, 2022)

I recently buy a Raspberry Pi4 for future backup of my @home on remote location.

The hardware used :
. Raspberry Pi4 Model B with 8GB ram and 32 GB sandisk
. Inateck USB3/sata case
. 1 GB Crucial SSD
And the Software:
OS is FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p6
% geli version
kernel: 7
userland: 7
% zfs version
zfs-2.0.0-FreeBSD_gf11b09dec
zfs-kmod-2.0.0-FreeBSD_gf11b09dec

My first surprise was to discover than RPi4 doesn’t support hardware AES Cortex-A72 processor Cryptography engine.

The optional Cryptography Extension is not included in the base product.
*ARM supplies the Cryptography Extension only under an additional license.*

The Rp4 hardware are build without this license $$$, the result is that all crypto are defined as software (kernel: GEOM_ELI: Crypto: software) same for all my test with openssl.
That’s a really bad news for speed and system load.

I’m ZFS user for long time, and with new openzfs i decide to test the ZFS Encryption support.
My basic I/O test was done by copying 10 GB files on ZFS dataset.

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p6 on Raspberry Pi4 with usb3 SSD (da0)
*ZFS (without crypto): 180 MB/s, da0 busy 100%, load 2
crypto GELI + ZFS   : 107 MB/s, da0 busy 60%, load 5
crypto ZFS Encrypt  : 25 MB/s, da0 busy 95%, load 10*

The I/O result with ZFS encrypted dataset are too low for me  i will continue with GELI…

Until Rock5Pi was avaiable what other fan-less arm system including crypto did you suggest me ?

The old grumpy sysadmin


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