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Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 16:13:18 +0200
From: Frank Steinborn <steinex@nognu.de>
To: Nikos Vassiliadis <nvass@teledomenet.gr>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, nospam@mgedv.net
Subject: Re: kern.randompid: jot generation senseful?
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Nikos Vassiliadis wrote:
> Isn't kern.randompid a boolean? TRUE or FALSE?

No.

> It is just on or off. 1 means PIDs are random.
> 0 means PIDs are sequential. to be exact, everything
> not being 0, is TRUE.

That is not true. Peter Pentchev once wrote:

"The kern.randompid sysctl is not a boolean flag, but an estimate of
the random value that will be added to each newly created pid. For
more information, read the comments in src/sys/kern/kern_fork.c before
the sysctl_kern_randompid() function (around line 150). The function
itself ignores sysctl settings of less than 2."

Frank