openwall / openwall/john

md5crypt-opencl often autotuning poorly (on nvidia 2080ti)

Open
#5,007 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

bug enhancement
Dominant language
C
Stars
13.6k
Forks
2.6k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

As mentioned in #5006, I noticed md5crypt-opencl would often autotune to too low values resulting in significantly lower speed.

In 10 runs on a 2080ti:

ws speed (many salts) num times
256, 34816 12916K c/s 6
256, 4456448 23014K c/s 2
256, 2228224 22825K c/s 1
256, 139264 21547K c/s 1

I haven't seen this behavior with any other format but it would sure be nice to avoid that lowest setting.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the md5crypt-opencl format's autotuning and work-size selection code, then reproduce the reported runs on an NVIDIA 2080 Ti. Compare the selected settings and speeds across repeated runs; done means the tuner no longer frequently chooses the lowest-performing setting without reducing performance elsewhere.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
performance
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.