Inside Secure SafeXcel EIP-93 crypto accelerator
A hardware cryptography accelerator block (symmetric ciphers and hashes) embedded in networking SoCs from MediaTek and Airoha, including the MT7621 used in many home routers and the newer AN7581 10G-PON gateway chips. It offloads bulk crypto work from the CPU so router and gateway devices can do VPN, IPsec, and disk/storage encryption at line rate.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because it was only merged in January 2025 and is still receiving active fixes into 2026. The hardware block lives inside current MediaTek MT7621 and Airoha (e.g. AN7581 10G-PON) SoCs that ship in residential and enterprise gateways being sold new today, so the driver supports live, in-market hardware.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Driver was merged in January 2025 as 'crypto: eip93 - Add Inside Secure SafeXcel EIP-93 crypto engine support', so this is a newly upstreamed driver rather than legacy orphan code.
- git.kernel.org
The driver received a substantive bug fix in January 2026 ('unregister only available algorithm'), showing active post-merge maintenance.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_CRYPTO_DEV_EIP93 present in current kernels and tied to SoC families including MT7621 and Airoha, indicating ongoing upstream enablement rather than retirement.
- airoha.com
Airoha markets the AN7581 10G-PON SoC for residential and enterprise gateways, supporting the view that at least one EIP-93 deployment family is current and sold in the 2025 era.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection showed a real platform crypto driver with OF compatibles for SafeXcel EIP-93 variants and MODULE_DESCRIPTION 'Mediatek EIP-93 crypto engine driver'. Local git log (via shell) showed initial merge on 2025-01-14 and substantive fixes through 2026-01-11, with no sign of stagnation. URLs for the two commits were formed from those locally obtained hashes using canonical kernel.org commit URLs (canonical recall). LKDDb URL was obtained via web search and supports that the driver is in current kernels and targets MT7621/Airoha platforms. Airoha product URL was obtained via web search and supports current-market deployment for AN7581-based gateways. I found no removal discussion in the limited lore/list-archive web queries, so there is no basis to escalate beyond keep.