Re: [PATCH] Use getentropy() for seeding PRNG

[Fritz Reese <fritzoreese@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 4:12 PM Janne Blomqvist
<blomqvist.janne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 5:36 PM, Fritz Reese <fritzoreese@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 9:19 AM Janne Blomqvist
>> <blomqvist.janne@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > The getentropy function, found on Linux, OpenBSD, and recently also
>> > FreeBSD, can be used to get random bytes to initialize the PRNG.  It
>> > is similar to the traditional way of reading from /dev/urandom, but
>> > being a system call rather than a special file, it doesn't suffer from
>> > problems like running out of file descriptors, or failure when running
>> > in a container where /dev/urandom is not available.
>> >
>> > Regtested on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, Ok for trunk?
>>
>> Actually, getentropy() is similar to reading from /dev/random, where
>> getrandom() is similar to reading from /dev/urandom.
>
>
> No, getentropy is similar to getrandom with the flags argument == 0. Which is similar to reading /dev/urandom, except that just after boot if enough entropy hasn't yet been gathered, it may block instead of returning some not-quite-random data. But once it has been initialized, it will never block again.
>
> I agree that reading from /dev/random is overkill, but this patch isn't doing the equivalent of that.
>

Fair enough, I misread the documentation on getentropy(). Then I
concur with Jakub, patch looks OK.

Fritz