/dev/random question

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

/dev/urandom is a hack.  In a perfect world, the /dev/random device
would be able to return a string of random numbers as fast as you
wanted, and there would not have been a need for /dev/urandom

Since FreeBSD tries to be close to perfect ;-) it uses a better
random driver that can produce random numbers as fast as you want
them.  The symlink is there only as a crutch for older UNIX code
that was written when there was a difference between /dev/random
and /dev/urandom

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Roland Smith
> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 8:37 AM
> To: Per olof Ljungmark
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: /dev/random question
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> Roland
> -- 
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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