Problems with the latest dropbear 2024.86 build

[Stuart MacIntosh]

Hi Kazuo,

I'm not a DropBear developer, but I'm guissing irix 6.5 has an 
old/outdated compiler? I've built the current DropBear and OpenSSH for 
old PowerPC MacOS, which might have similar challenges, and the compiler 
(gcc) simply needed upgrading before I got a working build.

Hope this helps, sorry I don't have any answers, good luck!

-Stuart

On 28/02/2025 10:54 am, Kazuo Kuroi wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> In order to better enumerate the problems the current version of drop bear has on irix 6.5, I rebuilt it and documented everything:
>
> 1. The SIGCLD bug I described and documented still exists.
> 2. After doing some in-depth testing, basically ed25519 and ECDSA are at minimum broken because SSH complains of a incorrect signature.
> 3. It functions unreliably and often hangs while trying to connect.
>
> I don't really know what else to give you to chew on because the architecture changed a lot from when we fixed it in 2019. I attempted to reapply my fixes but they did not fix the problem.
>
> I did manage to get a version of 2020.79 to build but again even though it builds cleanly, it breaks in unpredictable ways.
>
> I unfortunately don't have enough background to be able to continue poking at this and figuring it out on my own so if someone would like to help get a later version of dropbear actually working, they can reach out to me. I am also going to contact people in the community and see if they can poke around at it.
>
> I appreciate that this project has been around. Don't get me wrong. I just feel like we are kind of second class on support and with open SSH basically leaving people like us behind that doesn't give us a lot of good options.
>
> Thank you for reading