From owner-freebsd-current Tue Aug 22 7:15:21 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from lists01.iafrica.com (lists01.iafrica.com [196.7.0.141]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0795B37B43C for ; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 07:15:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nwl.fw.uunet.co.za ([196.31.2.162]) by lists01.iafrica.com with esmtp (Exim 3.12 #2) id 13REpe-0006Yi-00 for current@freebsd.org; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:15:14 +0200 Received: (from nobody@localhost) by nwl.fw.uunet.co.za (8.8.8/8.6.9) id QAA18531 for ; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:15:13 +0200 (SAST) Received: by nwl.fw.uunet.co.za via recvmail id 18004; Tue Aug 22 16:11:21 2000 Received: from grimreaper.grondar.za (mark@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by grimreaper.grondar.za (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id e7MDqbG00418 for ; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:52:37 +0200 (SAST) (envelope-from mark@grimreaper.grondar.za) Message-Id: <200008221352.e7MDqbG00418@grimreaper.grondar.za> To: current@freebsd.org Subject: Review requested for /dev/random driver improvements! Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:52:36 +0200 From: Mark Murray Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi All Please could those of you with the time and computrons available please review the patches for the entropy (/dev/random) driver at http://people.freebsd.org/~markm/randomdev.patch. NOTES: This code may injure your cat, your computer and/or your bank account; be careful! The code puts the responsibility of reseeding the entropy state variables into a kernel thread; this should make userland a lot snappier. There is a FIFO constructed from TAILQ's to buffer the entropy harvesting; this should further insulate userland from the internal workings. All the crypto and hashing has been broken out into a separate file to make the whole driver less dependant on particular algorithms. There is an (unresolved) issue with panics when the module is unloaded; I'm working on that, but if you get to it before me, your help would be appreciated. Not included in here is a direct tap into the random event stream to allow folks who need to "distill bits" to do their own entropy processing. This is being worked on. Other comments, patches and suggestions welcome! Many thanks to Brian Feldman for the kthreads example, and others for answering my questions online! M To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message