gcrypt, MPI, GMP and powerpc64

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:21, Victor Stinner said:

> So questions:
> - Can someone write assembler code for ppc64? It should be easy since GMP
> prototypes look to be the same, and assembler code for ppc64 already exist
> in GMP.

Yeah, I'd really like to see that.  the code from the current GMP is
basically useful but it needs to be converted to the configuration
scheme as used in libgcrypt. 

> - Would it possible to use GMP in gcrypt?

No.  For security reasons we don't wnat the whole GMP suff. Just the
modified and meanwhile hopefuly well security audited libgcrypt code.

> - Why using MPI instead of GMP?

At the time I wrote GnuPG (1997) GMP development had stalled for years
and was stuck at 2.something.  There was no maintainer for years.
Only later GMP 3 started and changed a lot of the assembler stuff - I
have seen eports that GMP is far less portable than it used to be.

There are quite some heavy changes in the internal working and what we
actually only need are the low level fucntions - should be easy to
adjust to libgcrypt but it is more work than I can spend on it.

We also need better optimized code for modern ia32 CPUS as well as for
ia64 or AMD.

And while we are at it: An optimized SHA-1 implementaion might make an
difference too.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner