These are strictly cpu-bound tests using 'openssl speed'. I didn't compile any of the openssl binaries here, so it's possible that differences in compilationcaused the differences in the numbers.

I've never noticed a performance decrease of the host vs guest systems in vmware, and here's data confirming my suspecions.

Versions:
guest/solaris10    OpenSSL 0.9.8e 23 Feb 2007
guest/freebsd6.2   OpenSSL 0.9.7e-p1 25 Oct 2004
host/linux         OpenSSL 0.9.8c 05 Sep 2006

'openssl speed blowfish'
                   type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
host/linux         blowfish cbc     72062.94k    77117.35k    78280.70k    78680.96k    79309.48k
guest/freebsd6.2   blowfish cbc     68236.69k    73335.83k    74060.50k    74423.40k    74703.29k
guest/solaris10    blowfish cbc     64182.15k    73944.47k    75952.21k    76199.94k    76931.07k

'openssl speed rsa'
                                      sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
host/linux         rsa  512 bits 0.000308s 0.000020s   3244.3  49418.3
guest/freebsd6.2   rsa  512 bits   0.0003s   0.0000s   3343.5  41600.1
guest/solaris10    rsa  512 bits 0.001289s 0.000116s    775.6   8630.8

host/linux         rsa 1024 bits 0.000965s 0.000049s   1036.7  20409.8
guest/freebsd6.2   rsa 1024 bits   0.0009s   0.0001s   1160.0  18894.2
guest/solaris10    rsa 1024 bits 0.007152s 0.000369s    139.8   2708.1

host/linux         rsa 2048 bits 0.004819s 0.000135s    207.5   7414.4
guest/freebsd6.2   rsa 2048 bits   0.0045s   0.0001s    222.8   6951.1
guest/solaris10    rsa 2048 bits 0.045780s 0.001334s     21.8    749.8

host/linux         rsa 4096 bits 0.028600s 0.000422s     35.0   2371.3
guest/freebsd6.2   rsa 4096 bits   0.0279s   0.0004s     35.8   2271.4
guest/solaris10    rsa 4096 bits 0.317812s 0.004828s      3.1    207.1

It's interesting that the performance on blowfish were pretty close, but rsa was wildly different. The freebsd guest outperformed the linux host in signing by 10%, but fell behind in verification. Solaris peformed abysmally. The freebsd-guest vs linux-host data tells me that the cpu speed differences between guest and host environments is probably zero, which is good.

Again, the compilation options for each openssl binary probably played large parts in the performance here. I'm not familiar with SunFreeware's compile options with openssl (the binary I used came from there).

Either way, the point here was not to compare speeds against different platforms, but to in some small way compare cpu performance between host and guest systems. There are too many uncontrolled variables in this experiment to consider it valid, but it is interesting data and put me on another path to learn about why they were different.

My crypto is rusty, but I recall that rsa may need a fair bit of entropy to pick a big prime. Maybe solaris' entropy system is slower than freebsd's or linux's system? This lead me to poke at /dev/random on each system. I wrote a small perl script to read from /dev/random as fast as possible.

host/linux        82 bytes in 5.01 seconds: 16.383394 bytes/sec
guest/solaris10   57200 bytes in 5.01 seconds: 11410.838461 bytes/sec
guest/freebsd6.2  210333696 bytes in 5.01 seconds: 41947398.850271 bytes/sec

I then ran the same test on the host/linux machine while feeding /dev/random on the host from entropy from the freebsd machine:

% ssh jls@teabag 'cat /dev/random' > /dev/random &
% perl devrandom.pl                                  
448 bytes in 5.00 seconds: 89.563136 bytes/sec

# Kill that /dev/random feeder, and now look:
% perl devrandom.pl
61 bytes in 5.01 seconds: 12.185872 bytes/sec

When speed is a often a trade-off for security, are FreeBSD's and Solaris's /dev/random features more insecure than Linux's? Or, is Linux just being dumb?

Googling finds data indicating that /dev/random on linux will block until entropy is available, so let's retry with /dev/urandom instead.

host/linux        29405184 bytes in 5.01 seconds: 5874687.437817 bytes/sec
guest/solaris10   70579600 bytes in 5.00 seconds: 14121588.405586 bytes/sec
guest/freebsd6.2  208445440 bytes in 5.02 seconds: 41502600.216189 bytes/sec

FreeBSD's /dev/urandom is a symlink to /dev/random, so the same throughput appearing here is expected. FreeBSD's still wins by a landslide. Why? Then again, maybe that's not a useful question. How often do you 40mb/sec of random data?

Back at the rsa question - If solaris' random generator is faster than linux in all cases, then why is 'openssl speed rsa' slower on solaris than linux? Compile time differences? Perhaps it's some other system bottleneck I haven't explored yet.