[geeks] whee!!!

[Scott Howard]

On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 01:04:57AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> I found Sun's /dev/random package to eat -way- too much CPU.  I use prngd,
> which works great, so long as you can live with a random socket, instead
> of a userspace random device.

Way too much CPU compared to what?  The author of ANDIrand openly
claims that it's randomness isn't that good, and I think if you look into
it you'll find that prngd isn't much better.  Good pseudo-ramdonness needs
lots of CPU - perhaps Sun's just done it better than the others?

> Sun's been talking about a /dev/random in Solaris 9.  Are they going to
> use the same broken crap that they gave us as an add-on to Solaris 8 or

Other way around - the Sol8 patch is a backport of whats in Sol9.

> are they going to do the right thing and implement a kernel-mode

Umm.. isn't this what we already have?

marvin# modinfo | grep -i rand
104 1026811f   1d42  56   1  random (random number device v1.1)

> /dev/random with hooks for their new crypto boards?

The /dev/random patch and the crypto cards are definitely related (the
patch was rushed out _because_ of the crypto cards), although I'm not
exactly sure in what way they are related.

  Scott.