News and Updates

There have been some major changes in the organization here so let me go through them a little. First, I've reorganized the top level directory to create space for binary packages. So what you'll now see is a directoyr for the source code patches in the Patches directory, Redhat RPMs in the RPMS directory, etc. As a note, I wouldn't really bother with the OpenSSL 1.1 compatability patches - those were mostly an exercise and are a twisty mess of ifdefs. It works but it's not something I'll be maintaining.

Currently we have RPMs for versions from 7.6.p1 through 8.1p1 inclusive. Building packages for debian isn't as easy to automate so I currently only have a version for 7.9p1. I'll be working on 8.0p1 and 8.1p1 over the next few days. I have also built an RPM that incorporates hpn-ssh into gsi-openssh. If you have globus set up for your authentication needs this is the package for you. However, this is only version 7.6p1 and built for Centos 7. This will be the only package for Centos 7 I'll be making available. All other versions will be for Centos 8. This is largely due to the incorporation of support for OpenSSL 1.1 into the gsi-openssh source packages I'm working from.

Also, I've made some necessary fixes to the multithreaded AES counter cipher (mt-aes-ctr). We needed to make some pretty big changes to that cipher for OpenSSH 7.6p1 that introduced a bug that caused intermittent hangs. Because of the way I was doing the regression tests I missed this. However, it's fixed now. That said, on systems that support the AESNI instruction set the mt-aes-ctr can be slower than the default. It depends on how many cores you have available (we support up to 64 cores now). I've been looking at incorporating AES-NI into mt-aes-ctr but it's harder than I expected. You can alwasy disable the mt-aes-cipher from the command line though with -oDisableMTAES=yes and see what works best for you.