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Date:      Wed, 6 Mar 2002 10:30:27 -0500 (EST)
From:      Adrian Filipi-Martin <adrian@ubergeeks.com>
To:        Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>
Cc:        FreeBSD Hackers List <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>, <kaj@ubergeeks.com>
Subject:   Re: Intel 820 RNG 
Message-ID:  <20020306102600.L56921-100000@lorax.ubergeeks.com>
In-Reply-To: <200203052342.g25NgTRV079032@grimreaper.grondar.org>

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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 ]


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