Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:31:55 +0100 From: RW <fbsd06@mlists.homeunix.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /dev/random question Message-ID: <20070913173155.0bad12b2@gumby.homeunix.com.> In-Reply-To: <20070913153630.GA9448@slackbox.xs4all.nl> References: <46E94F9A.6050707@intersonic.se> <20070913153630.GA9448@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
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On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:36:30 +0200 Roland Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 04:56:26PM +0200, Per olof Ljungmark wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Could someone on the list point me to a document that explains the > > functionality of /dev/random in FreeBSD in a little more depth than > > the man page? In other OS's I've looked at random and urandom are > > different, here it's a symlink (talking about RELENG-6 onwards). > > FreeBSD uses the yarrow algorithm, as mentioned in random(4). See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarrow_algorithm > http://www.schneier.com/yarrow.html Yarrow is reseeded with interrupt entropy, and is supposedly good enough not to require the amount of entropy to be tracked. So /dev/random need not block, and there's no need for a separate non-blocking device.
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