Has anyone tried adding a mini-pci crypto card (like this Hifn one) to their Mikrotik?

From my understanding of how hardware crypto works in Linux this is a fairly black and white thing with RouterOS: are the drivers in the standard Linux kernel and is the module them used by the standard crypto libraries without any other configuration requirements? If yes, it'll work. If no, it will not.

That said some RouterBOARD models have crypto acceleration.

as i know, only RB1000 and RB1100AH has the crypto accelerator. those soekris not supported - and as i know, crypto accelerated intel server cards also NOT works (as accelerator)

Thanks for the responses. I have a Hifn card so I ordered a RB433 and I'm going to give it a try for fun to see what happens.

using Linux on the board - it should work. I think, with ROS, it will not work, but please let us know.

I tried on an RB433 and the Hifn card showed up as an unknown device. On the x86 build of RouterOS it was recognized by name in the resources window. I'll have to do some additional testing and post some screenshots when I have time.

Unfortunately RouterOS does not support mini PCI crypto accelerators based on my experiments, although I feel that such a thing would be nice to set up VPN endpoints (or even small concentrators) without taking a hit on CPU for crypto. The Hifn cards are already pretty popular under Linux. Being able to add a crypto accelerator when and where it's needed would be a huge bonus to any Routerboard.