[Botan-announce] Botan 1.7.11 released: Salsa20, BigInt optimizations

[Jack Lloyd]

I've spun a new devel release of Botan, 1.7.11, which adds the Salsa20
stream cipher and a number of BigInt optimizations.

New profiling and optimization has produced an interesting
result. Something between 40 and 60% of the runtime of the public key
benchmarks (as measured by Valgrind's callgrind tool) is spent in the
function bigint_monty_redc in src/mp_monty.cpp. This function is
(after some optimizations made in this release), basically a leaf
function; the only functions it calls are (on x86-64) inlined
functions containing inline assembly. And I cannot see any obvious way
to optimize it further. So, if any asm hackers are looking for a
challenge, it appears that one can produce large speedups by
optimizing this function more.

Joel Low reported some build problems, I think I have fixed them
though I have still not tested DLL creation with Visual C++.

Direct link: http://files.randombit.net/botan/Botan-1.7.11.tgz

Regards,
  Jack