/dev/random question

[Mel]

On Sunday 16 September 2007 22:55:50 RW wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Sep 2007 15:21:38 +0200
>
> Mel <fbsd.questions at rachie.is-a-geek.net> wrote:

> > People
> > travelling the random road, will simply account for the possibility a
> > traffic light comes up, which never does.
>
> That's a poor analogy  because they haven't improved /dev/random so it
> doesn't block, they've taken a /dev/urandom implementation and renamed
> it. In terms of your analogy they've blocked off the road, diverted
> everyone onto the highway, and renamed it to main street.

No, cause then you'll notice the difference. Guess it was a bad analogy then.

An applicatation using /dev/random doesn't see the difference. It was 
necessary at the time, because systems couldn't produce enough entropy, so 
they could put the application on hold till more was available.
All the application wants is randomness and it accounts for the fact that it 
can be blocked, yet it never gets blocked so it's happy(tm) either way.

Also, I can't see how you can usefully improve on /dev/random other then 
getting rid of the blocking, so applications don't have to account for it.

> Using Yarrow for /dev/random is not an intrinsically bad idea, but it
> is controversial.

Removing /dev/random all together would be controversial. This is just 
backwards compatibility. Nothing changed as far as a consumer of /dev/random 
is concerned. It's not like an application SIGSEVS cause it got excited it 
never got blocked in the passed hour.

-- 
Mel