0.9.1

[Brian Warner]

wk at isil.d.shuttle.de (Werner Koch) writes:
> Or tell Sun to implement Tytso's /dev/random which has a BSD style
> license.  I'd prefer such a sulution.

I've been pondering this a bit.. (I had a similar problem, trying the
self-tests on my solaris box.. it took maybe an hour or so, driving the load
average up to about 10 in the meantime. Half the tests failed with "bus
errors" but that's another matter).

If we turned the rndunix code into a persistent daemon, with a pair of unix
sockets to correspond to /dev/random and /dev/urandom, couldn't that drop into
place on any system that supported such sockets? It could have internal timers
and run all manners of strange programs to obtain entropy, it could maintain
an entropy count and block on reads of /tmp/random when the entropy was low.
There would be issues of "should it be started automatically" and if so,
should it die automatically, but users (like me) who know what it does would
just start it from rc.local and let it live forever.

Except for the lack of the special ioctls (to measure or change entropy
count), would such a device be at all discernible from the real kernel-based
/dev/random?


ponderously,
 -Brian