From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Mar 7 6:36: 5 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mail.ubergeeks.com (lorax.ubergeeks.com [209.145.65.55]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D744837B405 for ; Thu, 7 Mar 2002 06:35:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (adrian@localhost) by mail.ubergeeks.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g26FURd56934; Wed, 6 Mar 2002 10:30:28 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from adrian@ubergeeks.com) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 10:30:27 -0500 (EST) From: Adrian Filipi-Martin Reply-To: Adrian Filipi-Martin To: Mark Murray Cc: FreeBSD Hackers List , Subject: Re: Intel 820 RNG In-Reply-To: <200203052342.g25NgTRV079032@grimreaper.grondar.org> Message-ID: <20020306102600.L56921-100000@lorax.ubergeeks.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Mark Murray wrote: > > We did make some enhancements that serve our needs, but may not be > > best for everyone. We actually need entropy in quantity since we could be > > doing a lot of crypto operations back to back and it can easily become our > > worst bottleneck. > > Have you looked at the "Yarrow" algorithm? Yes. I actually grilled you a bit about this at BSDCon 2000. :-) AFAIK, it will never be back ported to 4-STABLE. Is there an option that's appeared for FreeBSD besides this in the last 18 months? > In CURRENT, I have implemented Yarrow to achieve just this purpose. > > > The drawback to our approach is that it can spend a lot of time in > > the kernel. To tune this behavior we added a few sysctl's. The start/stop > > script after the diff's tweaks a few of these settings after boot up. > > Again, look at current. The RNG is _really_ fast. I know. I know. I wish we could use it. Unfortunately this is for an appliance type application and I just don't feel comfortably shipping -CURRENT as product. I'm only just now making the effort to get up to speed on -CURRENT so that we can be ready to use it later this year. Adrian -- [ adrian@ubergeeks.com ] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message