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To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:28:53 -0400."
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Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:41:33 +0000
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Cc: Daniel Eischen <deischen@freebsd.org>, Andrey Chernov <ache@nagual.pp.ru>,
	freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Max Laier <max@love2party.net>
Subject: Re: Is fork() hook ever possible? 
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In message <200809161628.54085.jhb@freebsd.org>, John Baldwin writes:

>The PID isn't the seed, he's using a PID change as a notification that the 
>process needs to do a re-stir the next time it wants a psuedo-random number 
>(b/c the PID change means it is now a new process).

Seems to be a vast overkill to me, in countless other contexts,
it is the responsibility of the programmer to do what needs done on
a fork, and I see no reason why this couldn't be likewise.

The majority of forks don't care a hoot about arc4random() because
the call exec after a bit of plumbing on filedescriptors.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.