## Issue Addressed
Related to: #2259
Made an attempt at all the necessary updates here to publish the crates to crates.io. I incremented the minor versions on all the crates that have been previously published. We still might run into some issues as we try to publish because I'm not able to test this out but I think it's a good starting point.
## Proposed Changes
- Add description and license to `ssz_types` and `serde_util`
- rename `serde_util` to `eth2_serde_util`
- increment minor versions
- remove path dependencies
- remove patch dependencies
## Additional Info
Crates published:
- [x] `tree_hash` -- need to publish `tree_hash_derive` and `eth2_hashing` first
- [x] `eth2_ssz_types` -- need to publish `eth2_serde_util` first
- [x] `tree_hash_derive`
- [x] `eth2_ssz`
- [x] `eth2_ssz_derive`
- [x] `eth2_serde_util`
- [x] `eth2_hashing`
Co-authored-by: realbigsean <seananderson33@gmail.com>
## Proposed Changes
Modify the SHA256 implementation in `eth2_hashing` so that it switches between `ring` and `sha2` to take advantage of [x86_64 SHA extensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions). The extensions are available on modern Intel and AMD CPUs, and seem to provide a considerable speed-up: on my Ryzen 5950X it dropped state tree hashing times by about 30% from 35ms to 25ms (on Prater).
## Additional Info
The extensions became available in the `sha2` crate [last year](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hf2vcx/ann_rustcryptos_sha1_and_sha2_now_support/), and are not available in Ring, which uses a [pure Rust implementation of sha2](https://github.com/briansmith/ring/blob/main/src/digest/sha2.rs). Ring is faster on CPUs that lack the extensions so I've implemented a runtime switch to use `sha2` only when the extensions are available. The runtime switching seems to impose a miniscule penalty (see the benchmarks linked below).
## Issue Addressed
- Resolves#1706
## Proposed Changes
Updates dependencies across the workspace. Any crate that was not able to be brought to the latest version is listed in #1712.
## Additional Info
NA
## Issue Addressed
NA
## Proposed Changes
Adds support for using the [`cross`](https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross) project to produce cross-compiled binaries using Docker images.
Provides quite clean and simple cross-compiles cause all the complexity is hidden in Dockerfiles. It does require you to be in the `docker` group though.
## Details
- Adds shortcut commands to `Makefile`
- Ensures `reqwest` and `discv5` use vendored openssl libs (i.e., static not shared).
- Switches to a [commit](284f705964) of blst that has a renamed C function to avoid a collision with openssl (upstream issue: https://github.com/supranational/blst/issues/21).
- Updates `ring` to the latest satisfiable version, since an earlier version was causing issues with `cross`.
- Off-topic, but adds extra message about Windows support as suggested by Discord user.
## Additional Info
- ~~Blocked on #1495~~
- There are no tests in CI for this yet for a few reasons:
- I'm hesitant to add more long-running tasks.
- Short-term bitrot should be avoided since we'll use it each release.
- In the long term I think it would be good to automate binary creation on a release.
- I observed the binaries increase in size from 50mb to 52mb after these changes.
