Chelsio Terminator 6 inline TLS/SSL crypto offload
Inline TLS and SSL encryption offload for Chelsio's Terminator 6 (T6) Unified Wire 10/25/40/100 Gbps Ethernet adapters, letting the NIC handle TLS record encryption and decryption in hardware to free up host CPUs. It targets specialized datacenter workloads such as high-throughput web servers and storage front ends that terminate large volumes of encrypted traffic.
recommendation
It should stay because the underlying T6 adapters are still sold new by Chelsio in 2025 with inline TLS offload as an advertised feature, and the code is still receiving real upstream attention, including a stable-tagged integer overflow fix in 2024 and a flex-array cleanup in late 2025. Deployments are niche, but the combination of current hardware sales and active maintenance makes removal unjustified.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
chtls still received netdev changes in late 2025 ('chtls: Avoid -Wflex-array-member-not-at-end warning').
- lore.kernel.org
chtls received a targeted bugfix in 2024 with a stable CC ('prevent potential integer overflow on 32bit').
- chelsio.com
Chelsio still listed a T6 adapter page with 'BUY NOW' and explicit TLS/SSL inline offload capability on a page crawled in 2026.
- chelsio.com
Chelsio's current adapter catalog still presents T6 Unified Wire adapters with crypto/TLS offload alongside newer products, indicating ongoing new-hardware availability rather than purely historical documentation.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local source inspection (`rg`, `find`, `sed`) shows this is a real kernel driver module (`obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_DEV_CHELSIO_TLS) += chtls.o`) implementing Chelsio TLS inline offload on top of cxgb4, not a helper library. lore_activity on `chtls_main.c`/`chtls_io.c` (netdev-filtered) found recent 2024-2025 fix/refactor traffic, including a stable-tagged bugfix, so upstream attention is still real. A quick lore removal probe produced no positive removal evidence. Web search on chelsio.com found current T6 product/catalog pages; the T6225-SO-CR page still advertises 'BUY NOW' and inline TLS/SSL offload, so the hardware family appears still sold new in 2025, but only for a specialized datacenter/offload niche. Because the hardware is niche yet still marketed and the driver is actively maintained, the defensible recommendation is keep rather than deprecate/remove. URLs were obtained via `lore_activity` and `web search/open`; no kernel.org URL was needed.