Re: af_alg benchmarks and performance

[Paul Eggert]

> Fortunately other non deprecated algos like sha256 are way
> faster.

Faster than when --with-openssl is used? Can you show me how to benchmark that?

After reading Assaf's comments I confess that I'm not getting the point of the 
recent changes. As I understand it, the hardware support in question is 
typically available to user-mode code so why go to the kernel at all? And even 
if there are magic features not available outside the kernel, why not let the 
OpenSSL library worry about the tradeoffs involved in user vs kernel mode rather 
than reinvent its wheel? It's a real pain to ship data off to the kernel with 
all the overheads and other hassles involved, and I don't see why it's a good 
idea for Gnulib to get involved.

At this point I am leaning towards reverting these changes. If we keep them, the 
default should be to disable this new feature; plus, several bugs (at least one 
of which I introduced; sorry!) need to be fixed. I'm not sure it's worth the 
maintenance effort to keep this stuff in, at least if it's coreutils we're 
talking about.