From owner-freebsd-current Thu Oct 26 14:44:38 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from dt051n37.san.rr.com (dt051n37.san.rr.com [204.210.32.55]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D288237B479 for ; Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:44:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from slave (Studded@slave [10.0.0.1]) by dt051n37.san.rr.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA19498; Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:44:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from DougB@gorean.org) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:44:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug Barton X-Sender: doug@dt051n37.san.rr.com To: Ed Hall Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: entropy reseeding is totally broken In-Reply-To: <200010262104.OAA20560@screech.weirdnoise.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Ed Hall wrote: > How about skipping the "long, annoying failover process" altogether and > simply logging to the console that the entropy reseeding process was > incomplete? Forcing an indeterminate delay to gather entropy is more > than a little paternalistic. The problem is, it's going to block somewhere. If we don't "block" while creating the entropy, the first thing that needs random bits is going to block for real because /dev/random isn't going to have anything to feed it. We must come up with an entropy reseeding mechanism that has a reasonably high degree of success for a reasonably high number of cases. Doug To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message