[Gllug] Gentoo on Sparcstation 20

[Nix]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004, Steve Nelson yowled:
>> However, the non-Ultra SPARC kernel is de facto unmaintained: the major
>> maintainers of the SPARCLinux kernels (David Miller, Jakub Jelinek and
>> Ben Collins spring to mind) are not paying attention to SPARC32 kernelspace
>> anymore.
> 
> FWLIW I've played a lot with Linux on 32-bit sparc, and while I've not
> used gentoo I could see it being painful, looking at how long it takes
> to generate RSA/DSA key pairs.

That's a pathological case for SPARCv7, relying as it does on lots of
multiplies: SPARCv7 has no hardware multiply instruction and has to do
the job via serial addition. If you compile an OpenSSL with
-mcpu=sparcv8 or -mcpu=ultrasparc or something like that, assuming you
have an appropriate chip, OpenSSL (and thus OpenSSH) will be back up
to `normal' speed again.


(FWIW, for the last few years Debian has shipped a v8-optimized OpenSSL
in /usr/lib/v8, which should be automatically picked up by the dynamic
linker if your machine supports it.)

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
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