OpenSSH 3.8.1p1 will be released soon (it's a bugfix release), so I sent a call-for-testing.

We run regular tests of the OpenSSH tree (the results go to the tinderbox) and I've been looking at improving the test coverage by building with non-gcc compilers on my Linux box. So far I have found:

• TenDRA, but the last time I tried it it would not build on my box.
• tcc, a small Linux/x86-only compiler.
• icc, which I just found has a non-commercial non-expiring license option.

I played with tcc which seems interesting (and fast), but ran into problems with its library-search behaviour. It would search -L paths last, and it would always use a dynamic library, even if a static library was before it in the library path.

Its code turned out to be quite easy to work with, so I modified it to handle -L/-l more like gcc does and submitted the patch back to the author. I also found what is probably a portability bug in OpenSSH. Unfortunately, some of the OpenSSH binaries produced by tcc segfault for reasons I've been unable to determine, so it's currently not suitable for regular build-and-test use.