From owner-freebsd-current Thu Oct 26 14:52:34 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (flutter.freebsd.dk [212.242.40.147]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 086BB37B4C5 for ; Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:52:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from critter (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by critter.freebsd.dk (8.11.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id e9QLq3N05035; Thu, 26 Oct 2000 23:52:03 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from phk@critter.freebsd.dk) To: Doug Barton Cc: Ed Hall , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: entropy reseeding is totally broken In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:44:29 PDT." Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 23:52:03 +0200 Message-ID: <5033.972597123@critter> From: Poul-Henning Kamp Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message , Doug Barton writes: >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. I think the strategy here is to feed it as much as we can from the kernel during device-probe/attach as possible. I don't really care that much how good my random bits are right after boot, but I do care about my machine coming up quickly. Add a /etc/rc.conf knob which says wait_until_entropy_collected=YES which people who care a lot about randomness can set. -- 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message