Re: Linking coreutils against OpenSSL
On Fri, 10 Nov 2023 at 02:26, Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > What would you think about having coreutils Depend on libssl3? This
> > would make the libssl3 package essential, which is potentially
> > undesirable, but it also has the potential for serious user time savings
> > (on recent Intel CPUs, OpenSSL’s SHA-256 is over five times faster than
> > coreutils’ internal implementation).
>
> That is only on amd64 though.
>
> On ARM and riscv64, OpenSSL is slightly slower than coreutils'
> sha256sum, so this would introduce an additional dependency and degrade
> performance. The best choice there is the kernel crypto API, which knows
> about offload hardware and special CPU instructions, both of which are
> common.
Per-architecture dependencies are possible though, so maybe starting
to add the libssl dependency only on amd64 is a good starting point,
and then users of other architectures can request to be added too if
it is beneficial for them.
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