This patch adds a general mechanism for providing encryption keys to the kernel from the boot loader. This is intended to enable GELI support at boot time, providing a better mechanism for passing keys to the kernel than environment variables. It is designed to be extensible to other applications, and can easily handle multiple encrypted volumes with different keys.
This mechanism is currently used by the pending GELI EFI work. Additionally, this mechanism can potentially be used to interface with GRUB, opening up options for coreboot+GRUB configurations with completely encrypted disks.
Another slight benefit over the existing system is that it does not require re-hashing the password.