On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 08:05:13PM -0800, Matt Holland wrote: > I need to generate more than one random number generator seed per second > within a C program (I have a program that runs about 6 times a second, > and I need unique seeds for each run). time(0) only gives me a > resolution of 1 second... any suggestions? > > Thanks, > Matt
Ummm, you don't really say what kind of random numbers you need, true random? Psuedo random? Unique? Just different? Any reason you couldn't just once a minute get some bytes from /dev/random to initialize a random() and generate 6*60 psuedorandom numbers? Quite a bit of effort has been put into /dev/random to insure it's as random as possible collecting entropy from as many places as possible, protection against entropy flooding, support for adding entropy by cat my_collection_of_random_stuff > /dev/random etc. Oh and it's careful to query information that is not easily visible outside the kernel. But the main problem is if you read to quickly from /dev/random you will block till the generator decides it has enough entropy to output more. -- Bill Broadley Mathematics/Institute of Theoretical Dynamics UC Davis _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
