Michael Hobbs wrote:
> I believe that the P3 chips come with a noisy diode built-in,
> specifically for the purpose of generating random numbers. You might try
> to find a way to access that little gizmo. (Assuming that you're running
> on a P3.)
Interesting! Do you have any reference for this?
I hope this diode is only accessible from supervisor mode, because
otherwise we won't have as many provably deterministic user mode
programs as before.
Relevance for Haskell would be that you wouldnt be able to fork a
program written in C into a protected environment (functional
sandbox?) and know that its result would depend only on its input
arguments. So you couldnt safely do this thru an ordinary Haskell
function call that could be cached for example.
To get at this diode, or any other such device, one should have
to go thru a device driver or I/O instruction that could be disabled.
I hope they did it like this...
Sverker Nilsson
>
> - Michael Hobbs
