From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Aug 14 23:43:10 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6CFAF16A4CE; Sat, 14 Aug 2004 23:43:10 +0000 (GMT) Received: from out003.verizon.net (out003pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.103]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E8BA443D2D; Sat, 14 Aug 2004 23:43:09 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from [192.168.1.100] ([68.161.136.200]) by out003.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.06 201-253-122-130-106-20030910) with ESMTP id <20040814234309.SCZI26805.out003.verizon.net@[192.168.1.100]>; Sat, 14 Aug 2004 18:43:09 -0500 Message-ID: <411EA389.2050305@mac.com> Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 19:43:05 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Watson References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out003.verizon.net from [68.161.136.200] at Sat, 14 Aug 2004 18:43:09 -0500 cc: markm@FreeBSD.org cc: current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Summary of discussion of harvester/random locking andperformance optimization X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 23:43:10 -0000 Robert Watson wrote: [ ...yay! much stuff about S = k log W... ] > Finally, a question I raised by e-mail previously and think it's worth > thinking about is how to decide what impact we're having on entropy > quality. In particular, are there scores or other easily understood > numerical or statistical results that can be exposed to a user or > developer to allow them to measure the impact on entropy quality and > availability resulting from specific configuration, optimization, etc. I think what you're asking about is something like: http://csrc.nist.gov/rng/ ...which have a fairly straightforward set of descriptions on a link off of that page, as well as source code and datasets. The code compiles with minimal changes-- use gmake and #ifdef 0 two sections of code involving definitions for INFINITY and NAN which already exist in the system header files. There's something about the way these tests abstract away the results into the "distribution of P-values" which is not entirely easy to understand, unfortunately, although some experimentation reveals that the stats from using data from /dev/random are fairly distiguishable from those of feeding the output of random() or rand() (or /usr/share/dict/*) into a file. -- -Chuck