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Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 13:38:45 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: [GSoC] building JtR for MIC

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 05:27:45PM +0800, Lei Zhang wrote:
> I tweaked with OMP_SCALE in several formats, according to magnum's advices, and their memory usage on MIC is much more reasonable now. With OpenMP enabled, john-jumbo won't abort anymore when running the benchmark, although 126 of the tests still FAILED.

That's a huge number.  How many of the failed tests are for dynamic*
formats?  Perhaps there's one or a handful of bugs that are causing most
of the failures.

I notice that in jumbo my original mic.h is modified to use autoconf'ed
ARCH_* settings:

#if AC_BUILT
#include "autoconfig.h"
#else
#define ARCH_WORD                       long
#define ARCH_SIZE                       8
#define ARCH_BITS                       64
#define ARCH_BITS_LOG                   6
#define ARCH_BITS_STR                   "64"
#define ARCH_LITTLE_ENDIAN              1
#define ARCH_INT_GT_32                  0
#endif

This might be wrong since we're cross-compiling.  I doubt it's causing
trouble now, though, since the host system is almost certainly x86_64,
for which these settings just happen to be the same.

> Next I want to figure out how those tests failed, but I have a few questions first: (forgive me if they look stupid...)
> 1. What exactly does it mean for a format to FAIL the test?

See formats.c: fmt_self_test().  It's usually indicated after a call to
which of the format methods the test failed, but you'll most commonly
see get_hash[0](0) or something, which means that the actual failure was
likely in a preceding crypt_all() or set_key() or set_salt().  The test
vectors are in the tests[] array in each format's *_fmt*.c file.
In some cases, it's possible to narrow the problem down by temporarily
commenting out some of the test vectors.  But usually not.

> 2. There're two kind of numbers in the output, real and virtual. What's their difference?

This is in the FAQ:

Q: What are the "real" and "virtual" c/s rates as reported by "--test"
(on Unix-like operating systems)?
A: These correspond to real and virtual (processor) time, respectively.
The two results would differ when the system is under other load, with
the "virtual" c/s rate indicating roughly what you could expect to get
from the same machine if it were not loaded.

... but this FAQ entry is outdated and needs to be revised.  As written,
it applies to single-threaded builds only (I wrote it before we
introduced OpenMP support).  Clearly, the numbers also differ greatly in
multi-threaded builds.  When running a multi-threaded build on an
otherwise idle system, the "real" speed will be roughly equal to the
"virtual" speed times the number of threads.

Alexander

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