Re: /dev/one - why not /dev/repeat?
H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
24 Dec 1998 21:18:28 GMT
Followup to: <199812241606.NAA01198@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl>
By author: Horst von Brand <vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> > That's legitimate, if you have an application that really would be
> > substantially faster with a /dev/random. What is this app, and can
> > you show benchmarks?
>
> That's right! Show benchmarks, and we'll beat the blue sky out of them by
> careful use of an inlined RNG that _must_ beat the cost of doing a system
> call + assorted data copies + the actual RNG work. Besides, a program where
> the RNG is a significant fraction of the cost strikes me as quite odd...
>
> The _only_ reason for /dev/{,u}random is as a (limited?) source of truly
> random bits (AFAIU, the distribution isn't even known to be nice at
> all!)
"Truly random" implies a flat distribution. /dev/random is the
limited source of as-close-as-possible-to-guaranteed-to-be-random
bits, /dev/urandom degrades to a cryptographically strong PRNG when it
runs out of enthropy.
-hpa
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