Re: [PATCH] API for true Random Number Generators to add entropy (2.6.11)

From: Herbert Xu
Date: Fri Mar 25 2005 - 01:37:06 EST


On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 09:34:19AM +0300, Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:
>
> Such hardware is used mostly in embedded world where SW crypto
> processing
> is too expensive, so users of such HW likely want to trust to
> theirs hardware and likely will turn in on.

That's fine. All you need for these embedded users is a user-space
daemon that feeds data from the hardware directly into /dev/random.
No matter how small your system is, I'm sure you can spare a few
hundred bytes for such a thing.

In fact most of these systems will have some sort of a general-purpose
daemon that sits around which can perform such a task.

System calls on Linux are fast enough that there is really no
advantage in doing this in the kernel.

But if you're really desparate, write a kernel module that does this
in a kernel thread.
--
Visit Openswan at http://www.openswan.org/
Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/