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Date:  Mon, 06 Nov 2000 08:15:16 +1100
From: Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au>
Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/etc rc
To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Cc: "John W. De Boskey" <jwd@FreeBSD.ORG>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
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On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 08:09:43PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
>In message <20001023204336.A46026@bsdwins.com> "John W. De Boskey" writes:
>: If you want the entropy to be saved into swap, it seems
>: like we should add this type of functionality to rndcontrol.
>: 
>: rndcontrol -w /dev/da0s1b    # write entropy to end of partition
>: rndcontrol -r /dev/da0s1b    # attempt to read entropy from partition
>
>The problem with having a program do it is that our shutdown
>proceedures won't always run that program.

Rather than "rndcontrol -w /dev/foo" in /etc/rc.shutdown, have
"rndcontrol -r /dev/foo" read entropy from /dev/foo and flag that the
kernel should dump entropy to /dev/foo during its shutdown.  This is
the way crashdumps work.

As for using the same space for entropy and crashdumps - make sure
that if a panic occurs, the entropy is written before the crashdump.
If the partition is big enough, the crashdump won't overwrite the
entropy.  If not, you'll use the crashdump to seed yarrow next time.

Peter


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