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Date:      Fri, 12 Jan 2001 12:14:43 +0200
From:      Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
Cc:        Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>, Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>, Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za>, obrien@FreeBSD.org, Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/etc crontab rc src/etc/defaults rc.conf  src/etc/mtree BSD.root.dist src/libexec Makefile  src/libexec/save-entropy Makefile save-entropy.sh
Message-ID:  <3A5ED913.6B09A21F@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <200101120644.f0C6hvI12630@gratis.grondar.za>  <200101120534.f0C5YYH96390@earth.backplane.com>  <200101120652.f0C6qls78578@harmony.village.org> <200101120711.f0C7B4Y97991@earth.backplane.com>

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Matt Dillon wrote:

> :
> :In message <200101120644.f0C6hvI12630@gratis.grondar.za> Mark Murray writes:
> :: >     I would do the following:
> :: >
> :: >    * Use Warner's fix, possibly adding 'dmesg' output in phase-1.
> ::
> :: It make more sense to make the random device nonblocking-at-boot than
> :: to do this.
> :
> :Maybe we could make it non-blocking until the first write to
> :/dev/random?  This would solve the problems that we're seeing, as well
> :as allowing sshd to have enough entropy to get good results.

I like this idea, but perhaps it would be nice to have more fine-grained control
over when /dev/random is blocking and when not. Why not to add sysctl to switch
between blocking/non-blocking behaviour (defaulting to non-blocking), so our
startup scripts would be able to switch /dev/random to be secure at the point
when it's safe to do (all f/s mounted) much like it copes with kern.securelevel.
Additionaly it would solve the problem that you are not able to use almost
anything in single-user mode (less, vi, ee etc) w/o feeding /dev/random by hand
first.

-Maxim




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