Re: [PATCH] rand.c updates from FreeBSD RELENG_5

[Kris Kennaway <kkenn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2004-05-12, Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>:What problems?  I did a grep for /dev/random on 4.x and only came up
>:with a couple of uses in contrib/.
>:
>:>     I think we should simply use /dev/urandom here,
>:>     which is guarenteed not to block and will certainly produce a
>:>     random enough seed for rand's tiny little seed.
>:
>:/dev/random is non-blocking in FreeBSD 5.x since it uses a different,
>:non-blocking algorithm.
>:
>:Kris
>
>     Search the FBSD mail archives for the subject line '/dev/random'.  There
>     have been several threads.   Most recently, a newfs after booting into
>     single user would lock up until enough randomness existed for its
>     inode seeding.

That was driver breakage, not a misuse of /dev/random vs. /dev/urandom.

Kris