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Because AESNI and CLMUL, AES-GCM is faster than a SIMD implementation of ChaCha20Poly1305. In theory, ChaCha20 is overkill, 8 rounds would have been enough and people do use 12 rounds for disk encryption.

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Yes that was my thoughts as well, if you are concerned about speed and dropping AES rounds, you might as well do the same with Chacha and use Chacha20/8 (which I don't know if it "exists" but Salsa20/8 is a thing, used in scrypt and available in libsodium for example). At least it's also fast when you don't have AESNI.

Really pedantic nit here, but the cipher Salsa20 is called “Salsa20” and so reduced round versions are called e.g. “Salsa20/8”. However the ChaCha cipher is just called “ChaCha” so the specific-round versions are just “ChaCha20” or “ChaCha8”.

I feel like I just “actually it’s GNU/Linux”ed you there though... I feel bad, I’m sorry.

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