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Date:      Sun, 28 Nov 1999 23:42:02 -0800 (PST)
From:      Kris Kennaway <kris@hub.freebsd.org>
To:        Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Cc:        Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.org>, audit@freebsd.org, Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/conf files.i386 src/sys/kern kern_fork.c src/sys/libkern arc4random.c src/sys/sys libkern.h 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.9911282330220.21883-100000@hub.freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9911291736390.11459-100000@alphplex.bde.org>

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On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, Bruce Evans wrote:

> It's unreasonable to ask a new committer to use /dev/random when more
> important things like netinet don't use it.  To use it in

One must start somewhere - I hope the other candidates get addressed over
the next few months (most of the patches should be simple merges from
openbsd).

> machine-independent code, you first have to implement it for alpha.  Here
> is a toy implementation:

Good point. Again, OpenBSD have presumably got working code we can pull
over. I'll check that tomorrow, time permitting. Hmm, given this it may be
more productive to simply bring across the entire OpenBSD /dev/random as
Dan suggested, Mark's plans to implement Yarrow notwithstanding. Thoughts,
Mark?

> This does the same thing as the i386 implementation on a bad day.  The
> caller must be prepared for a limited amount of entropy being available.
> All callers except the ones for userland get this wrong by calling
> read_random() on alphas and always ignoring the result of read_random().

Can you suggest a decent fix? Simply polling until we fill our desired
buffer? Using read_random_unlimited() may well be "good enough" in many
cases.

I'll add the cases you mentioned to my list of things to look at - thanks!

Kris



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