On Fri, 10 Nov 2023 at 02:26, Simon Richter <s...@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.
