svn commit: r346250 - in head: share/man/man4 share/man/man9 sys/dev/random sys/kern sys/libkern sys/sys

[Conrad Meyer]

Hi Warner,

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 8:47 AM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 9:16 AM Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Isn't a file full of data which is distributed in identical form to
>> everyone the exact opposite of entropy?

Ian has the right idea.

> It's just to bootstrap entropy for installs. The CI stuff doesn't matter if that's the same since the CI images aren't exposed to the internet in any way that would make it matter. The normal install would have the same seeds of entropy, but diverge from there fairly quickly. The stuff that's used early in the install is the don't care sort of things that won't matter in the installer (which then creates it's own entropy that's different for every install).

I agree that it would be safe, although potentially misleading and
potentially dangerous, to create a fake entropy file for the installer
images.  We need to be careful *not* to embed such files in .img files
which are installed by 'dd' directly to a disk or flash or VM, for
example.  It would be catastrophic to distribute the same entropy file
to all FreeBSD AWS images.

Best,
Conrad