From owner-cvs-all  Thu Jan 11 10:55:19 2001
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From: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za>
To: obrien@freebsd.org
Cc: Doug Barton <dougb@freebsd.org>, cvs-committers@freebsd.org,
	cvs-all@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/etc crontab rc src/etc/defaults rc.conf src/etc/mtree BSD.root.dist src/libexec Makefile src/libexec/save-entropy Makefile save-entropy.sh 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 11 Jan 2001 10:33:17 PST."
             <20010111103317.A74363@dragon.nuxi.com> 
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 20:54:16 +0200
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On Thu, 11 Jan 2001 10:33:17 PST, "David O'Brien" wrote:

> Why use /.entropy as the default rather than /var/<xxx>/entropy ?
> / is often quite small, and everyone knows /var must (1) be writeable,
> and (2) have space for things to grow in.

I'm pretty sure that this has all been discussed before, with quite a
bit of consensus (although some might bitch about the period in the
directory name '/.entropy'.

The entropy seed files need to be in the root partition because a seeded
entropy device is needed _very_ early on.  Specifically, it's needed by
at least mount_mfs(8).  If we wait 'til /var is mounted, we have to wait
for everything in /etc/fstab to be mounted, so you end up with
mount_mfs(8) blocking on the entropy device.

Hope that helps.

Ciao,
Sheldon.


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