[PATCH] rand.c updates from FreeBSD RELENG_5
Kris Kennaway
kkenn at xor.obsecurity.org
Wed May 12 19:13:21 PDT 2004
On 2004-05-12, Matthew Dillon <dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>: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
>
> Search the FBSD mail archives for the subject line '/dev/random'. There
> have been several threads. Most recently, a newfs after booting into
> single user would lock up until enough randomness existed for its
> inode seeding.
That was driver breakage, not a misuse of /dev/random vs. /dev/urandom.
Kris
More information about the Submit
mailing list