The sparc-sources don't carry the OpenSSL MPPE patch, but the patched x86 kernels do. The problems arise when one tries to create an encrypted VPN using pptpd. Unfortunately, I couldn't get either the stock patch nor the Gentoo patch to successfully patch against sparc-sources, so I reverted to vanilla-sources. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Emerge sparc-sources. 2. Build an PPP-enabled kernel. 3. Install and configure pptpd. 4. Connect using a Windows client. Actual Results: The Windows client fails at "Registering on the network...". pppd complains about a terminated LCP session when in fact it's reading encrypted garbage. Expected Results: Had the patch been applied to sparc-sources, the connection would have been set up successfully.
...and the patched vanilla-sources fails because of missing FPU-related symbols. :-(
i don't who of you handles this
It's the first time i hear about MPPE. The other sparc devs don't seem to know it much as well. We have enough arch releated problems with sparc-source at the moment and i'm not willing to add such really specialzed things as a patch which only makes it worse. Such patches also make it harder to update once a new kernel version is released. I think at this point we should focus on really generic patches (like grsecurity for example) and ofcourse sparc specific fixes and updates. I leave this bug open until i talked to most other devs and heard their opinion.
I can see how stabilizing the current SPARC kernel is first and foremost. I would however like to suggest it as a high ranking feature. The ppp build in Portage is patched against MPPE by default, so I do suppose it would be consistent with Gentoo policy. :-)
There are currently no plans to integrate this in the sparc kernel now.