OpenSSL 0.9.8k
I just upgraded OpenSSL to version 0.9.8k. 0.9.8k is the latest stable version of OpenSSL. OpenSSL in OpenSolaris before this was at version 0.9.8a with backported security fixes. I moved OpenSSL from ON to SFW a couple of weeks ago so as to make the work of upgrading simpler. There were a couple of motivators for upgrading but the one with the biggest impact is undoubtedly performance - particularly on amd64 platforms. OpenSSL 0.9.8k comes with most ciphers implemented in hand-coded assembly for maximal performance on amd64. Almost all of this can be enabled on OpenSolaris (to maintain ABI compatibility I couldn't enable this for rc4). Simple comparisons of openssl speed of before and after show larger performance gains in many ciphers.
Here are a couple of specific speed-ups I saw:
Sun Fire 2100 - AMD Opteron CPU
| md5 (8192): | 1.55x |
| sha256 (8192): | 2.30x |
| aes128 (8192): | 1.73x |
| rsa2048 (sign): | 3.43x |
| rsa2048 (verify): | 2.83x |
Sun Fire x4150 - Intel Xeon CPU
| md5 (8192): | 1.71x |
| sha256 (8192): | 2.05x |
| aes128 (8192): | 1.40x |
| rsa2048 (sign): | 3.00x |
| rsa2048 (verify): | 2.55x |
There is also hand-coded assembly for 32bit x86. This wasn't enabled with the latest putback but expect to see it soon giving very nice speed-ups for 32bit applications on x86.
Of course there are other advantages to keeping OpenSSL up-to-date - bug fixes being the other primary advantage.
