On Wed, Jun 30, 2010, Ger Hobbelt wrote: > :-( I hope I recall correctly that what I mention next is indeed stuff > happening in RAND_screen()... IIRC RAND_screen() isn't 'only' reading the > screen but also doing a system-level heap traversal and a few other things > and it was exactly that system-level heap traversal that slowed a few > spurious Win boxes down to a snail's pace, so my take is it doing that to > yours too.
Just a correction. RAND_screen() doesn't perform those other activities such as heap walking, those happen during the automatic entropy gather on Windows. There are known issues with Windows 7 and some 64 bit versions of Windows two. I asked about this and the actual bug is the previous "quick" behaviour. The functions apparently need to do a lot of time consuming things which previous versions of windows didn't handle correctly. I'd first suggest trying a newer version of OpenSSL such as 0.9.8o which does include some timing code that halts heap walking if it is taking too long. It isn't the only source of entropy, there are several others including the CryptoAPI PRNG. Steve. -- Dr Stephen N. Henson. OpenSSL project core developer. Commercial tech support now available see: http://www.openssl.org ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager majord...@openssl.org
