Michael Sproul 2c691af95b Use hardware acceleration for SHA256 (#2426) ... ## Proposed Changes Modify the SHA256 implementation in `eth2_hashing` so that it switches between `ring` and `sha2` to take advantage of [x86_64 SHA extensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions). The extensions are available on modern Intel and AMD CPUs, and seem to provide a considerable speed-up: on my Ryzen 5950X it dropped state tree hashing times by about 30% from 35ms to 25ms (on Prater). ## Additional Info The extensions became available in the `sha2` crate [last year](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hf2vcx/ann_rustcryptos_sha1_and_sha2_now_support/), and are not available in Ring, which uses a [pure Rust implementation of sha2](https://github.com/briansmith/ring/blob/main/src/digest/sha2.rs). Ring is faster on CPUs that lack the extensions so I've implemented a runtime switch to use `sha2` only when the extensions are available. The runtime switching seems to impose a miniscule penalty (see the benchmarks linked below).		2021-07-12 08:47:01 +00:00
..
environment	Altair consensus changes and refactors (#2279)	2021-07-09 06:15:32 +00:00
src	Use hardware acceleration for SHA256 (#2426)	2021-07-12 08:47:01 +00:00
tests	Adjust beacon node timeouts for validator client HTTP requests (#2352)	2021-07-12 01:47:48 +00:00
Cargo.toml	Use hardware acceleration for SHA256 (#2426)	2021-07-12 08:47:01 +00:00