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.
Alternatively, what would you think about making sha256sum etc.
divertible and providing implementations both with and without the
OpenSSL dependency?
Makes sense to me, especially if it is a diversion only, not full
alternatives (which could not have sensible priorities, because what is
fastest is system dependent.
Simon
