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RadioGatún[64], etc.

 

November 18 2013

In this blog, I discuss Deadwood’s RadioGatún[64] support, MaraDNS’s cost, and getting Unicode characters in Xterm when using CentOS 6.

==Deadwood now can use RadioGatún[64]==

I have updated Deadwood to optionally use RadioGatún[64]; the default is still to use RadioGatún[32].

On 64-bit systems, not surprisingly, the 64-bit version of RadioGatún is about 45% faster than the 32-bit version. What did surprise me is that, on 32-bit systems, the 64-bit version is about 5% faster than the 32-bit version. While the 64-bit version needs more operations on a 32-bit CPU, these operations are done only half the time; one gets an overall performance boost.

One advantage the 32-bit version does have is that its code is about 33% smaller (600-700 bytes smaller) than the 64-bit code on 32-bit systems.

RadioGatún, unlike ARX (add-rotate-exclusive or) ciphers, only performs bitwise rotations, exclusive or, and bitwise or operations, so it does not have the performance penalty running the 64-bit version on a 32-bit system that ARX ciphers have.

It can be downloaded here:

http://maradns.samiam.org/deadwood/snap/
==MaraDNS’ cost==

Using the COCOMO II - Constructive Cost Model and my take-home pay at the time I started developing MaraDNS (which is less than what I actually cost my then-employer), MaraDNS is worth about two million dollars (US currency). I have freely donated all this effort to the Internet for anyone to download and use.

I devoted a decade of my life and $2 million worth of software development time making MaraDNS.

==Xterm 7x14 Unicode font==

If I do the following in CentOS 6:

xterm -fn 7x14

I get almost no Unicode characters, but if I do this incantation:

xterm -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1

I get reasonably good Unicode BMP coverage (including smart quotes).

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