Re: Linking coreutils against OpenSSL
On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 10:38:13AM +0000, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> 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.
>
Per architecture does cause problems if we end up with a two tier system
where some architectures can never catch up or if we have users who assume
that Debian will work similarly on every architecture.
It may also introduce code complexity which is undesirable in the longer term.
Just my 0.02 - I have no particular viewpoint in the best course of action
overall.
Andy
[amacater@debian.org]
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