Re: randomness

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 11:12:05PM -0400, Roland McGrath wrote:
> > The one issue there is that you'd want it to run as early as possible, so
> > you'd want to wake up /dev/random at startup.  I thought it would be nice
> > to have egd write to /dev/random, as this would automatically start the
> > active translator as well, but /dev/random polling from some fifo would
> > also work of course.
> 
> It's canonical in Linux to store a file of gathered randomness on shutdown
> and prime /dev/random with this on boot; i.e. "cat seed-file > /dev/random".
> This will start the passive translator up.
> 
> > There is also a nice feature of writing a seed file.  This will be
> > absolutely cool together with the shutdown notification.
> 
> I assume you are just talking about what is canonically done on Linux.

My translator takes the seed file as an argument, and reads it when it
initializes itself (when first random is requested), and writes it back when
it gets the shutdown notification (or is asked to go away, or receives a
SIGTERM).  The code to read and write the seed file is already there from
gnupg.

Reading the seed file is a bit different operation than gathering random
(which I want to allow by io_write, and by polling channels as you
suggested).

Marcus

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Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    address@hidden
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