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by RiverCrochet 162 days ago
Remember LibreSSL? That was borne of Heartbleed IIRC, and I remember presentation slides saying there was stuff in OpenSSL to support things like VAX, Amiga(?) and other ancient architectures. So I wonder if some of the things are there because of that.
2 comments
fanf2 162 days ago
Most of the performance regressions are due to lots of dynamic reconfigurability at runtime, which isn’t needed for portability to ancient systems. (Although OpenSSL is written in C it has a severe case of dynamic language envy, so it’s ironic that the pyca team want a less dynamic crypto library.)
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tialaramex 162 days ago
The Amigans really like their system. So they kept using them long after mainstream users didn't care. By now there probably aren't many left, but certainly when LibreSSL began there are still enough Amigans, actually using an Amiga to do stuff like browse web pages at least sometimes, that OpenSSL for Amiga kinda makes sense.

I mean, it still doesn't make sense, the Amigans should sort out their own thing, but if you're as into stamp collecting as OpenSSL is I can see why you'd be attracted to Amiga support.

Twenty years ago, there are Amigans with this weird "AmigaOne" PowerPC board that they've been told will some day hook to their legitimate 20th century Commodore A1200 Amiga. Obviously a few hundred megahertz of PowerPC is enough to attempt modern TLS 1.0 (TLS 1.1 won't be out for a while yet) and in this era although some web sites won't work without some fancy PC web browser many look fine on the various rather elderly options for Amigans and OpenSSL means that includes many login pages, banking, etc.

By ten years ago which is about peak LibreSSL, the Amigans are buying the (by their standards) cheaper AmigaOne 500, and the (even by their standards) expensive AmigaOne X5000. I'd guess there are maybe a thousand of them? So not loads, but that's an actual audience. The X5000 has decent perf by the standards of the day, although of course that's not actually available to an Amiga user, you've bought a dual-core 64-bit CPU but you can only use 32 bit addressing and one core because that's Amiga.

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