Mailing List Archive: Nessus Development Question

Hi James,

On Oct 30, 2008, at 4:43 PM, James Birk wrote:

>
> Are there any plans currently to "carbonize" Nessus under OS X to take
> advantage of the upcoming Grand Central/OpenCL in OS X 10.6? If not,
> is this something that's completely off the table, or something that
> would be considered?

As far as Grand Central goes, that technology is interesting for
applications which have not been multi-threaded yet. While Nessus 3 is
not multithreaded per se, it divides the work among multiple
processes, which eventually leads to the same result.

As far as OpenCL goes, we've done little investigation, I doubt there
are any major benefits using it in our case. OpenCL is useful for raw
calculations, but what nessusd/NASL do are mostly system calls (send/
recv). Maybe we could benefit by moving _some_ items to OpenCL (the
regex, and the plugin compilation) but no clear test has been done yet.

-- Renaud

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