Michael Stone writes: > On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 03:35:58PM +0200, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote: > > The shared library is 179 kB. Why don't you just provide the optimized > > versions in the same package? Are the any stability/correctness issues > > Now for the real overachiever, what would be really cool is if you > hacked openssl to do *runtime* detection of which optimizations to use.
I suspect it would be "better" to do install-time selection; the preferred way to choose is to benchmark the alternatives on a realistic task. That isn't something most people would want to do when they load the library, since it takes a while to do, and on a given CPU, the results are unlikely to change over time. Semi-static choice also makes it easier to diagnose which variant is being used when there are problems and is probably easier to do than run-time selection. (The overachiever variant of this is to set up dpkg alternatives at install-time so that the system admin can use the existing framework to override the automatic selection.) Michael