Void Linux returns from LibreSSL to OpenSSL

The developers of the Void Linux distribution approved which was reviewed since April last year suggestion to revert to using the OpenSSL library. LibreSSL is slated to replace OpenSSL on March 5th. It is assumed that the change will not affect the systems of most users, but will significantly simplify the maintenance of the distribution kit and will solve many problems, for example, it will make it possible to build OpenVPN with a standard TLS library (now, due to problems with LibreSSL, the package is being built with Mbed TLS). The cost of returning to OpenSSL will be to end support for some packages that rely on the old OpenSSL API, which has been dropped in new branches of OpenSSL, but has been retained in LibreSSL.

Gentoo, Alpine and HardenedBSD projects have already returned from LibreSSL to OpenSSL. The main reason for the return of OpenSSL was the growing incompatibility between LibreSSL and OpenSSL, which led to the need to supply additional patches, made maintenance more difficult and made it difficult to update versions. For example, the Qt developers refuse to support LibreSSL, and shift the work of solving compatibility problems to the distribution developers, which requires a lot of additional work to port Qt6 when using LibreSSL.

In addition, the pace of development of OpenSSL has increased in recent years, thorough work has been done to improve the security of the codebase and add hardware-specific optimizations, and a full implementation of TLS 1.3 has been provided. Using OpenSSL will also allow to extend support for encryption algorithms in some packages, for example, in Python, when building with LibreSSL, only a limited set of ciphers was included.

/Media reports.