On Sat, Jun 11, 2016, at 22:37, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 05:14:50PM -0400, Random832 wrote: > > So, I have a question. If this "weakness" in /dev/urandom is so > > unimportant to 99% of situations... why isn't there a flag that can be > > passed to getrandom() to allow the same behavior? > > The intention behind getrandom() is that it is intended *only* for > cryptographic purposes.
I'm somewhat confused now because if that's the case it seems to accomplish multiple unrelated things. Why was this implemented as a system call rather than a device (or an ioctl on the existing ones)? If there's a benefit in not going through the non-atomic (and possibly resource limited) procedure of acquiring a file descriptor, reading from it, and closing it, why is that benefit not also extended to non-cryptographic users of urandom via allowing the system call to be used in that way? > Anyway, if you don't need cryptographic guarantees, you don't need > getrandom(2) or getentropy(2); something like this will do just fine: Then what's /dev/urandom *for*, anyway? _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
