On Mon, 4 May 2026, at 06:14, Eric Biggers wrote:
> Earlier the decision was made to keep this code for a while, despite no
> other architectures having optimized MD5 code anymore, because of
> someone using it via AF_ALG via libkcapi-hasher
> (https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected]/)
>
> However, with AF_ALG itself now being on its way out due to its
> continuous stream of security vulnerabilities
> (https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected]/),
> it's time to be a bit more forceful with nudging people towards
> userspace crypto code.  It's always been the better solution anyway, and
> it's much more efficient if properly optimized code is used.
>
> Thus, drop the PowerPC optimized MD5 code.  Note that this code contains
> no privileged instructions and could be run in userspace just fine.
>
> MD5 is still supported, just with the generic code only.  I.e., this
> commit only changes performance; it isn't a hard break.
>
> This also has no effect on implementations of md5sum that already just
> use userspace code (as they should), for example the coreutils one.
>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <[email protected]>

Acked-by: Ard Biesheuvel <[email protected]>

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