Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 01:07:22 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: Nate Lawson <nate@root.org> Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/modules/random Makefile src/sys/dev/random randomdev.h randomdev_soft.c randomdev_soft.h yar Message-ID: <20040413010417.U11578@odysseus.silby.com> In-Reply-To: <5475.1081806410@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <5475.1081806410@critter.freebsd.dk>
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On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > I therefore think that we should retain a crypto/yarrow afterburner > on all random sources, but it may make sense to have offer different > grades of random bits for performance reasons. > > -- > Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 One thing that might make sense is to rename + wrap arc4random. In the TCP stack, we use arc4random because it's fast and good enough, not because RC4 has some particular importance. Therefore, if we instead called arc4random fast_random, Mark could feed minimally processed hardware entropy sources to fast_random, bypassing RC4 totally. However, the question I have is this: Is the C3's hardware PRNG actually faster than RC4 by a margin significant enough to make such an optimization worthwhile? Mike "Silby" Silbersack
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