[PATCH] rand.c updates from FreeBSD RELENG_5

Kris Kennaway kkenn at xor.obsecurity.org
Wed May 12 13:18:24 PDT 2004


On 2004-05-12, Matthew Dillon <dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>     I have one comment, and that is that the use of /dev/random has
>     created lots of unexpected problems in FreeBSD which they have 
>     hacked around.  

What problems?  I did a grep for /dev/random on 4.x and only came up
with a couple of uses in contrib/.

>     I think we should simply use /dev/urandom here,
>     which is guarenteed not to block and will certainly produce a
>     random enough seed for rand's tiny little seed.

/dev/random is non-blocking in FreeBSD 5.x since it uses a different,
non-blocking algorithm.

Kris





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