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bepaald

Member

Registered: 2016-10-08

Posts: 18

mingw-w64-binutils 2.43-1 breaks mingw-w64-openssl?

Hi!

This morning an issue was opened on my github project about the Windows binaries not working, I went to investigate and found that building mingw-w64-openssl on an updated system does not currently result in a working (static) library.

Since building the previous version of mingw-w64-openssl showed the same problems (even though it worked before), I went on to investigate its dependencies. Long story short, what I found was:

On a fully updated system, with mingw-w64-binutils 2.43-1, building mingw-w64-openssl results in:

 $ ls -lh /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 115M feb 15 14:57 /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a

Note the abnormally large archive of 115M. Building and installing the openssl package shows no errors. Building any small example program using openssl results in a very large executable, that fails to run:

[~/programming/tests/openssl_tests] $ cat OPENSSL_AES_ENCRYPTION.cc
#include <memory>
#include <iostream>

#include <openssl/evp.h>

int main()
{
  std::cout << "OpenSSL version:  " << OPENSSL_VERSION_TEXT << std::endl;

  std::unique_ptr<EVP_CIPHER_CTX, decltype(&::EVP_CIPHER_CTX_free)> ctx(EVP_CIPHER_CTX_new(), &::EVP_CIPHER_CTX_free);
  EVP_CIPHER_CTX_set_padding(ctx.get(), 0);

  std::cout << "Done" << std::endl;
  return 0;
}
[~/programming/tests/openssl_tests] $ x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ -Wall -Wextra -Woverloaded-virtual -Wshadow -c -pedantic -std=c++23 -D_WIN32_WINNT=0x600 -I/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/include/ -O3 -flto -o openssl_test.exe OPENSSL_AES_ENCRYPTION.cc
[~/programming/tests/openssl_tests] $ ls -lh openssl_test.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 svandijk svandijk 19M feb 15 15:37 openssl_test.exe

Running the resulting binary on Windows shows no output at all.

After _only_ downgrading mingw-w64-binutils to the previous version 2.39-1 (pacman -U mingw-w64-binutils-2.39-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst), building mingw-w64-openssl gives:

 $ ls -lh /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3,7M feb 15 15:06 /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/libcrypto.dll.a

The library size is back to normal. Compiling the same small test program now is also much smaller:

[~/programming/tests/openssl_tests] $ x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ -Wall -Wextra -Woverloaded-virtual -Wshadow -c -pedantic -std=c++23 -D_WIN32_WINNT=0x600 -I/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/include/ -O3 -flto -o openssl_test.exe OPENSSL_AES_ENCRYPTION.cc
[~/programming/tests/openssl_tests] $ ls -lh openssl_test.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 svandijk svandijk 19K feb 15 15:37 openssl_test.exe

And it runs on Windows just fine:

C:\Users\User>S:\openssl_test.exe
OpenSSL version:  OpenSSL 3.4.1 11 Feb 2025
Done

C:\Users\User>

I guess I don't have a question really, apart from: can anyone confirm these findings, or am I doing something stupid? Does anyone happen to have more info on this?

Thanks!

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 13,458

Re: mingw-w64-binutils 2.43-1 breaks mingw-w64-openssl?

There's a newer version (2.44) of mingw-w64-binutils in extra-testing , have you tried with that one ?

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bepaald

Member

Registered: 2016-10-08

Posts: 18

Re: mingw-w64-binutils 2.43-1 breaks mingw-w64-openssl?

There's a newer version (2.44) of mingw-w64-binutils in extra-testing , have you tried with that one ?

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, 2.44 gives the same result as 2.43.

*edit*
Though they were never packaged, I have also built some of the previous versions, and can say that 2.43 is the first version showing this problem, any earlier works.

Last edited by bepaald (2025-02-16 14:56:09)