On Thu, 2016-11-10 at 15:23 +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > [was: Re: Status for bug 71211? [random(4): clarify utility and > volume]] > > Hello Nikos, > > On 11/10/2016 09:42 AM, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote: > > > > On Wed, 2016-11-09 at 16:27 +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) > > wrote: > > > > > > Nikos, > > > > > > This was an earlier mail from Laurent Georget. I bring > > > you into this thread in case there's any of Laurent's comments > > > that may be helpful as inspiration for your patch. > > > > > > See also https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71211 > > > > I think that's a nice comment. The text referred to applies to old > > kernels not new ones (especially not after the recent rewrite), and > > I > > think it documents and opinion rather than a fact. I am inclined to > > simply drop the referred paragraph. Any better suggestions? > > Dropping the paragraph appears too strong too me. Surely we want > to maintain a recommendation not to consume too much data from > /dev/urandom? Stephan Mueller or Ted should be able to provide more info for the new code. I think in the new versions of /dev/urandom the amount consumed shouldn't cause issues or affect other users. However, I agree that overall, that this is a low level interface and it should be treated as such. I.e., I'd expect applications to use their crypto libraries' interfaces rather than getrandom directly. The reason is not only about being slow, but about having to take care about EINTR, short reads, quirks such as for early boot, etc [0]. regards, Nikos [0]. I've tried to write down some argumentation at: http://nmav.gnutls.org/2016/10/random-generator-linux.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
